


Blue Bayou

by The_Lionheart



Series: One Sword [1]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Aromantic Character, Asexual Character, Asexual Relationship, Blood and Gore, Damn Ford, Dimension Travel, Dreams and Nightmares, Grunkle Ford Has Issues, Grunkle Ford Needs A Hug, Grunkle Ford's Portal Adventures, Interdimensional Fight Club, Minor Character Death, Not really SCP Foundation- Just a brief visit with one of their worlds, Road Trip Buddies Sorta, SCP-093, There's a tag for 'Grunkle Ford Has Issues' and it's so accurate, Zombies, brought to you by: hilarious kill bill quotes while watching GF, dad jokes, in another universe Ripley grows up to be the Bride
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-07-27 00:48:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 24,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7596790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Lionheart/pseuds/The_Lionheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><div class="center">
  <p>
    <br/>
    <em>"So good-bye, I'll be leaving,</em>
    <br/>
    <em>I see no sense in this crying and grieving,</em>
    <br/>
    <em>We'll both live a lot longer</em>
    <br/>
    <em>If you live without me..."</em>
  </p>
  <p> </p>
  <p> </p>
  <p>   <em>- Linda Ronstadt, "Different Drum"</em><br/></p>
</div>
            </blockquote>





	1. Rooster

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Ain't found a way to kill me yet.  
> Eyes burn with stinging sweat.  
> Seems every path leads me to nowhere."
> 
>  
> 
> \- Alice in Chains, "Rooster"

It's been five years and Ford Pines still hasn't given up on the idea that he might make it back home one day. He's been in some bad scrapes, but he's survived, he's changed, he's improved his circumstances. He's lost the layer of what his Ma (maysherestinpeace) used to call Baby Fat up til the day she died. He sometimes thinks ~~Stan~~ Pa would be proud of him for winning the number of fights he's gotten himself into, but it means when he does get caught off his guard his reputation has already started to precede him.

He doesn't know what's going to happen until the baglike hood is torn off his head and he's shoved into the arena, and a tall humanoid with a shaggy blonde mane lowers some kind of energy sword, peering at him through tinted goggles. He is only a little groggy, drawing his gun slightly more slowly than he likes. He lost his glasses when he was snatched up, but the blurry figure before him is close enough to be an easy target.

"This is your only chance to live," he says, aiming for the torso. He's been forced to fight before, and he's willing to kill if he needs to-

"Aw, what the hell," she says, and it takes Ford a minute to realize that his translator chip isn't working because it doesn't have to- she's speaking English, her voice muffled by a black balaclava-looking mask but unmistakably human.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

She still remembers: summertime in Atlanta, living out of the back of a van, the back door open to let in what little summer breeze could be carried on the wings of the rampant mosquitoes. She remembers running away from home, getting picked up by the Guy (his name escapes her but his face does not) and the way she towered over him, six foot one in the flipflops he gave her. She remembers that it hadn't been so bad, that he was often broke, that he was always a gentleman, snoring in the front seat so she could be alone on the mattress where the backseat should be. She remembers vans, cars, trucks, trains, boats, airplanes. She remembers _Planes, Trains & Automobiles_. She remembers that she has lots of movies that she likes but that one's her favorite. She remembers watching TV- Saturday Night Live and Sesame Street, mostly. She remembers random stuff- facts from school, the fact that she went to school. She remembers that she was nineteen when she was Taken, and she knows that it's been ten years.

She still remembers falling into the Void, stepping away from the Guy's van for a few minutes because she saw lights and thought she heard a kid's voice, and the way she tripped on pine needles and fell upwards instead of down.

She remembers landing hard, remembers the rough hands of an inhumanly gray faceless thing as it slapped something metallic onto her neck and growled at her in a voice that almost sounded like a person that it was to keep her from screaming during processing. She doesn't remember if she screamed or not as she was processed.

She remembers another human with her- a man in black gear like a soldier or a SWAT officer- who came over once she was shoved into the room, shivering in the thin shirt and gym shorts she'd been wearing to go to sleep in. She remembers that he took the shirt off his back- black, almost the right size, with his name SAVAGE stitched onto the breast pocket- and helped stuff her trembling arms into the sleeves. She remembers that he was kind, that he spoke gently, that his name was John, and that he tried to teach her how to fight, how to resist being taken the next time their abductors came. She doesn't remember what happened when they came for her, but she must have failed, because there's a gap in her memory between the last time she saw him and being traded to another alien, dull purple with too many arms and a mouth full of wolf's teeth.

This one didn't speak English beyond "human" and "go", but they did implant her first translator after only a week of mutually frustrating miscommunication. She remembers that she was living in Dimension 98@, although she is sure she's missing something in the translation no matter how she tries to make the name fit her mouth. She remembers the first time she caught sight of herself and staring in horror- they'd shaved her head at some point, and there was an ugly scar on her left temple that she didn't remember getting. She still doesn't remember getting it. She remembers being traded to a merchant in Dimension ^G72, sold to a green-blue insectoid with a gambling habit in Dimension HYQ44, and traded to a bird-headed guy in Dimension 55{3 who liked to collect human stuff. She remembers the closest thing she had to a friend was a little knee-high helper bot who ran errands with her, and that she didn't make eye contact with another human once in the three years after she lost John Savage. She remembers painstakingly picking at the stitches, tearing the patch with SAVAGE on it off of the black cloth so she could take it with her. She remembers the first time she fought- her little helper bot sizzling and sparking at her feet as she pummels a chitinous creature whose voice snaps too quickly for her translator to hear and being impounded- not jailed, after all, because you don't put property in jail. She remembers the put-upon indignation of the bird-headed guy as he told her he had no place for violent pieces, before he sold her to a M'Qalese guy in Dimension 4N*A who ran a (legal? semi-legal?) fighting ring.

She knows it's weird that she doesn't remember her name. She knows it's weird that she tells people she's named Ripley, that she remembers more about the movie with Sigourney Weaver than she does about herself. She knows it's weird that very few people ask, instead assuming that she's called Savage because it says so on her shirt.

She knows she hasn't seen another human in years, been spoken to in English in longer, and a day after her six-kill streak she gets thrown into the ring and the opponent is just some guy- brown hair, maybe her height, wearing a long brown coat. She lowers her sword at once, startled at the sight of someone so out of place.

When he speaks he reminds her of John, a little.

"Aw, what the hell," she says, deactivating Ol' Sparky and sheathing the "blade" at her side. Ripley pulls the goggles down with the mask, and can't help the hopeful smile as it forms.

"I'm warning you!" the man yells, the odd little gun shaking in his massive hand. She raises her own empty, gloved hands- in half the dimensions she's been, it's an insult, but he visibly relaxes, even if he still looks suspicious at her attempt to be nonthreatening.

"You're- you're not from Dimension 46'\, are you?" she asks, and he startles a little. Boss man on the sidelines is looking intrigued- she likes that about him, as far as you can like an alien slavemaster who forces you to fight for your dinner. He doesn't force death if the storyline's good enough.

"If this is some kind of trick, it's- it's not working," the man snarls. Ripley grins, stepping closer.

"Look, I don't want to get shot and you don't want to die, right? There's a way out of this, you just have to trust me," she tells him.

"Why should I?" he snaps, but she knows he's not going to shoot if he hasn't already.

"We're the same," she says, spreading her arms. "Look, man. We're both human, we're from the same dimension, we're from America even? That's not a coincidence, that's a message from the universe. We should work together."

"How do I know you're even human, how do I know you're not working for him?" he hisses, and she doesn't know if she's all that sure he won't shoot her. This close, she glances down and is mildly surprised to realize that his hands look huge because there's an extra finger there, and she can see the slight blush along his face and what she can see of his ears when she looks back up at him.

"Those are both questions I'll be happy to answer in private, man," she says, using what she hopes is a soothing tone. "Look, half the skazzers here don't have translators, right? But everybody knows that us humans get bounced around to auction houses across the multiverse, and I dunno how well-read you were before you left home, but Romeo and Juliet style starcrossed lovers bullshit gets eaten up literally everywhere. Just follow my lead and we can get out of the arena for tonight, man."

"Romeo and Juliet _die_ at the end," he grumbles, holstering his gun, and she lets out a laugh, pulling him in for a chaste kiss on the mouth. He gives her a startled look, and she winks, linking arms with him as she turns to face the arena owner.

"Honorable one, who reunited me with my [partner/spouse]! This day you have [won/achieved] my eternal loyalty!" she proclaims in passing fair M'Qalish. To his credit, the boss is beside himself with glee, roaring his approval, and it makes Ripley smile wider to imagine him planning out how to use them in some soap opera side story.

"Eternal loyalty?" the man whispers under his breath, tightening an arm around her waist.

"And? I also called you my wife, buddy, that's just how this is gonna be right now," she whispers back. They don't get a chance to talk again before they are escorted out of the ring- it's maybe an hour before they find themselves alone in Ripley's cubby, the man's scattered belongings spread across her bunk.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 Ford sits on the edge of the cot, which is almost the same size as the bed in his dorm back at Backupsmore and much too small-looking for someone of the blonde's size. She disarms and pulls out a set of tools that look vaguely familiar.

"Gonna do some maintenance while we talk, ya good?" she asks, and the Southern twang reminds him so much of Fiddleford that it hurts. She doesn't wait for him to respond before she starts taking her energy sword apart. "So how long has it been since you were homeside?"

"Five... five years," Ford says after while, staring down at his clenched fists. He swallows, glancing up at her. "And yourself?"

"I'd say 'bout ten years," she replies, before pursing her lips. "Give'r take. Hand me that chamois, if you don't mind?"

"O-of course," he says, passing it over. He stares up at her, wondering if she's a really human, if she's really a servant of Bill, how to find out if she is without her knowing...

"It's rude to stare," she says quietly, jolting him out of his reverie and doing nothing to assuage his fears. The goggles were back up, and he didn't get a good enough look at her eyes before.

"Of course, of course, I'm sorry, I just- it's been a while since I've even seen another-" he cuts himself off, averting his gaze. "So you've been here ten years?"

"Nah, I've only been here-here for a year and a half, I think," she replies. "Bought and sold a few times across the multiverse, which wasn't fun. I started out in 98@ though, with another human. Don't suppose you've run into a guy named John Savage, at some point?"

Ford shakes his head, and she shrugs sadly.

"Figures."

"Have you ever thought about escaping? Getting back home, back to your life?" he asks abruptly, and she shrugs again. "Why not, though? If I- I've done nothing but try to get home since I went through the portal."

"Oh, I dunno," she says, putting down the tools. "I guess I could take it or leave it. I didn't really have a home there either, yanno?" Ford gives her a narrow-eyed stare, and she puts her hands up again in mock-surrender. "What, did I offend?"

"I don't think I trust you," he says shortly, his handheld Destabilizer on his lap.

"You're not very good at thanking people for help, are you?" she asks, glancing down at the weapon with the careless amusement of someone who either doesn't know what it can do or whose body is an illusion that wouldn't be affected anyway. Ford scowls at the extra paranoid intrusion, and it takes a nearly inhuman act of will not to point the Destabilizer at her right then and there.

"All you've done is lie in order to get me alone, and spin some story to get me to accept that you won't know things I know about Earth and wouldn't want to get back or help me get back," he replies, and she gives him an unimpressed look at the coldness of his voice.

"Aw, calm your tits, guy. If I'd wanted to hurt ya, I'd've done it in the ring," she says, before shucking off her black armored jacket to expose a loose gray top and a dark farmer's tan that looks like it had hurt to get- unbidden, Ford wonders what she had been doing to get such a ferocious sunburn. "Look, you've been away from home for five years, so last time you were homeside you were what, twenty-seven? Twenty-eight?"

"Thirty-two," he corrects, and she winks, waggling an eyebrow at him. "And if you were- supposedly- gone for ten years, that would put you at-"

"Twenty-nine now," she says, making a space next to him to sit down and peel off her boots. "So not only have I been here for twice as long as you, but I had twelve less years than you to live on Earth to begin with. Plus," she adds, raking her hand through her hair to show him a large scar on her forehead over the edge of the goggles, faded to a pearly white. "I got this right after I got here, so I barely remember home to begin with."

"Hm," Ford says, a cold knot forming in his stomach. "Could you take your goggles off so I can take a look at that?"

"Uh, okay. Sure," she says, pulling them all the way off and leaning toward him a little. He stares into her eyes- a bit bloodshot, a gray-brown hazel color, but nothing inhuman, nothing that looks like something from the Nightmare Realm peering back out at him. This close, her features are only a little bit blurry. He misses his glasses. She gives a nervous little cough and he pulls back, reminded unpleasantly of the last time he saw Stanley. "Wow, uh. Pretty intense for somebody who doesn't trust me, huh?"

They sit in awkward silence for a moment or two.

"My name is Stanford," he says. "I still don't think I trust you."

"My name is- I'm called Ripley," she replies, glancing aside. "It doesn't matter if you trust me, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't shoot me in my sleep."

"No promises," he mutters, and she rolls her eyes, pushing his stuff over onto the other side of the minuscule bed.

"Get some sleep over there, Stanford," she instructs, stretching out onto her side and making a visible effort to take up only half of the bed.

"I'm not tired," he says, and she makes another unimpressed noise, rolling onto her back and propping herself half-up on her elbows. Ford stands abruptly, directing his gaze toward the energy sword she'd been fiddling with earlier. "Mind if I take a look at this?"

"You can mess with it if you do it quietly and don't make it so I end up without a reliable weapon in the ring," she says, watching him with an expression he hasn't seen since... since-

_-the world gone grey and muffled, the only color and light coming from him, "You know, Six-Fingers, I don't say this often but you're special, kid-"_

-hand on his arm, easily slapped away. Ford breathes hard, staring down at her, at the expression on her face.

"Don't touch me," he grits out, and she draws her hand back.

"You got a little lost there, is all," she says, looking down and away.

"Mind your own business," he replies, and after a while she lies back down and pretends to sleep. Ford doesn't bother pretending.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It's just that he reminds her of John, Ripley thinks glumly to herself. That's all. She likes to think she's a good person, by human standards, and that she would want to help Stanford out regardless, but she can't help John Savage and _this_ guy is _here_ , so...

Sleep is long in coming, and it feels like only an hour or two has passed when she is shaken back into the waking world.

"Someone's here, my translator doesn't know the language," Stanford's voice, warm against the shell of her ear, and his broad hand enveloping her entire shoulder. "Ripley, get-"

"M'wake," she says, sitting up and rubbing her eyes to get a look at the intruder before recognizing a fellow fighter, an older alien who's due to be retired. "[What's the word, Devaaki?]"

"[You're due for a fight,]" the crimson-furred Tacidian tells her, jerking an appendage at Stanford. "[Him too. It's not going to be a death match, but the boss wants to see what he can do.]"

"[We didn't get much sleep,]" Ripley says, frowning, and the Tacidian nudges her.

"[I don't want to know about what you perverts get up to in your free time. You two are on the deck in fifteen cycles.]" Ripley waves him out of the cubby, before turning to give Stanford a sour look.

"What was that about?" he asks, and she points at the still-disassembled energy sword.

"I'm going to need that in five minutes. We're up for a friendly match," she tells him. "And by we, I mean me. Myself. You look like you're getting older by the second. Why did you think you didn't need sleep, man?"

Stanford merely scowls ferociously at her, and she sighs, slapping a hand against his shoulder.

"Don't worry about it," she says. "I can convince them to let me do all the fighting this time, but you really need to- you really need some sleep, Stanford. You have to be in fighting form, buddy."

She pulls on the same boots and armored jacket she had on yesterday, watching with no small amount of interest as he hurriedly puts the components of Ol' Sparky back together. She would have imagined the sixth finger to be in the way, sort of, but if anything he looks like his hand's faster and more graceful than hers. When Stanford passes the sword back to her she holds it out and turns it on, the light of the blade shining on both their faces.

"Looks like it's already running cleaner," she tells him, which is true enough. "Thanks." She sheathes the unlit sword again, giving Stanford a thumbs' up. "I'll be back soon, unless you want to watch?"

"No, thank you," he says gruffly, and she nods amiably.

"The fightin's not for everyone," Ripley agrees. "Back in an hour."

Technically, she would be back in an hour if she doesn't get hurt and if the fight doesn't drag out, but it's closer to two and a half hours by the time the ringside medic is done patching her up. She doesn't have a mirror but she figures she looks worse than she feels when she gets back to the cubby and Stanford looks up at her and nearly falls off the bed.

"So much for sleeping, huh?" she asks, tossing him the wrapped rations she earned in the fight. "You gonna eat, though, right?"

"I'm not hungry," he says stiffly, and she huffs out a laugh as she eases herself down onto the bunk, too sore and tired to pull off her combat attire.

"Well, I'm a little hungry, if you want to pass me one of those?" He hands one off to her and grimaces as she unwraps the unattractive brown protein jelly and breaks a corner of it off in her dirty fingers. She pops it in her mouth and swallows without chewing, in a futile attempt to make the flavor go away faster. "Bleh. Maybe one of these days we'll get pizza, huh?"

"What is that?" he asks, horrified.

"Probably best if we don't think about it," she says, listlessly waving her other hand. "Soylent Green would probably be a step up."

"Heh," Stanford actually almost-smiles, before looking at the protein slab with a slightly more disgusted look. "Have you tested it for drugs or any kind of mind control agents?"

Ripley stares at him, then looks pointedly around the tiny room that encompasses the entirety of her personal wealth- bare walls, industrial floor smudged with what has to be decades' worth of accumulated filth, a small shelf holding a basket of her clothing and another of her weaponry, a narrow cot jammed up against a slot in the wall- and back at Stanford, who at least has the grace to realize the error in what he's said.

"I realize that you don't have any equipment that could possibly-" he starts, flustered.

"Yeah, that's... that's only the beginning of the list of reasons why I couldn't have done that," she interrupts, grinning. "Did you go to college? You seem like you did."

"I have multiple doctorates," he says stiffly.

"Yeah, I have a high school education, nothing that would have taught me how to, uh, test alien food for drugs or whatever," she says, reaching over to pat his leg but thinking better of it before she makes contact. "Not that I remember much of it, but I know I graduated." The look on his face is almost painful, but she's not sure what she said wrong. Ripley curls in on herself a little, looking down. "Anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if the food was drugged. Mild painkillers maybe, since a lot of us get beat up pretty bad."

"Probably more than that, if everyone else is as blase as you are about the notion," he says shortly. She shrugs, rolling her eyes a little.

"Well, forgive me for not being willing to just roll over and die of starvation rather than eat drugged food," she mutters. "I'm sorry I'm too stupid to think of some other way to survive here."

They sit in awkward, heavy silence for a few minutes, neither one willing to look the other in the eyes. It's Stanford who breaks the silence, his voice distant.

"I didn't mean to make you feel... stupid," he says. "I'm... sorry." Ripley stares down at the protein jelly in her hands, frowning.

"Well, you successfully put me off my feed, at any rate," she says quietly, giving him a weak smile. "Congratulations, you managed to do something that the flavor, texture, and implied cannibalism didn't."

"I try to be exceptional when I can," he replies, and it's almost a good enough joke to make her smile real. He glances over at her again, seemingly steeling himself for some arduous task. "You know- none of my doctorates is for anything related to, ah, medical science."

"So ironically enough you're not a doctor-doctor, just a, like, professor style doctor," Ripley muses.

"I have picked up a thing or two over the years, though. If you're comfortable with it, I could give you a once-over, make sure you're, uh, doing okay. Medically speaking. After your fight," he clarifies. She blinks, before smiling a little at him.

"Well, don't twist my arm or nothin'," she jokes, peeling off her combat jacket to give him access to a particularly sore spot on her upper arm. He doesn't laugh, but that's alright, because she never got to hear John laugh, either.


	2. Lithium

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "And just maybe I'm to blame for all I've heard,  
> But I'm not sure.  
> I'm so excited, I can't wait to meet you there,  
> But I don't care."
> 
>  
> 
> -Nirvana, "Lithium"

It's been almost six years since he lived with a roommate- Ford knows this because ~~he~~ ~~Bill~~ **he** drove Fiddleford away about three months before he fell through the portal.

It's only been a few days and it makes sense that he's not used to having a roommate again. Ford is still having a hard time sleeping with the sound of Ripley's snoring, neither of them is satisfied with the compromise of eating only half of the food that they both know is drugging them, and Ripley apparently didn't know it but she's practically an octopus in her sleep, curling her arms and legs around the new source of warmth. The first time she did it, Ford's surprised yelp startled her awake and made the situation worse when she sleepily tried to push him behind her so she could fight whatever intruder she'd assumed was the cause of his yell.

It's only been a few days and already Ripley's twice had to shake him awake from his nightmares, worried and confused and clumsily comforting. She's accidentally called him "Stan" but only once, apologizing immediately as soon as she saw his face, so Ford assumes his expression was terrible and has given her permission to call him Ford instead. She tries to get him to open up a little, sharing stories of the past ten years and teaching him a little bit of the languages he keeps hearing without adequate translation. He repays her with monosyllabic responses and performs maintenance on her gear, teaching her why her routine maintenance works to keep her energy sword running and showing her how to do a few new tricks.

She starts calling him 'Professor' and he doesn't know how he feels about it.

He starts putting together a plan to escape. He doesn't know if he's going to tell her or not.

He watches her next fight, winces in sympathy despite himself when she uses her sword- the sword he fixed for her- to cut a seven-foot-tall ratlike humanoid in half at the waist. She doesn't brag about her win later; he wonders if it was someone she knew. He's finally made to enter the ring again a couple of days later, and when she's pinned down by one of a pair of crabfaced beings he incinerates its head before it can bite her a second time.

He finds out, hovering at her side in the medic's station, that the bite is venomous, and the only good thing about it is that they're both given a few more days to recover before they will be called in to fight again.

She is mostly unconscious, at least until he tries to push her body into the bunk, struggling with her dead weight until she's sufficiently awake to climb in herself.

"Don't go," she murmurs blearily, one hand tangled in the ragged material of his long coat.

"I wasn't going anywhere, Ripley," he tells her, and she grins crookedly.

"Y'always say that, John," she says, and her smile fades as her head lolls back against the cot. "Yer th'worst at stayin'."

"I'm not John," he says firmly. "It's Ford. Stanford, remember?" She blinks up at him for nearly a minute before she nods.

"Pr'fessor Ford," she agrees. "You saved me, dint you? I remember that... that guy really had me there."

"I suppose I did," he says quietly, pulling off a glove and putting the back of his hand against her forehead. A little sweaty and feverish, but not warm enough to be worried yet. She reaches up to grab his hand, blinking sluggishly.

"C'n ask you somethin'?" she asks. "How come... how come six?"

He huffs, removing her loose grip on him. "It's a birth defect. Polydactyly."

"Like Hemingway cats," she mumbles, and he nods, surprised that she would know something like that. "Must be hard to find gloves though."

"Flat-out impossible, for a while there," he admits. She nudges his arm a little. "What?"

"Be a good way to fuck with a fake psychic. Palm reader." She grins sleepily at him. "We gotta do that if we ever get home."

"Heh, yeah," Ford smiles back."But, to be completely honest, I did do that back home once. It didn't surprise her at all."

"Wha," Ripley gasps, putting her hand to her head. "You're- oh god, Ford, yes. I love it. What happened?"

"Well, then she tried to flirt with me, so..."

"Hot diggity dog!" she laughs, burying her face against his side. "That's... that's amazing. I love it."

"Go to sleep, Ripley."

He decides to tell her about his escape plan once she's doing better.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It's maybe a day after he tells her what he wants to do, and Ripley is still having a hard time following. She understands that he means to leave this place, this planet, this entire godforsaken dimension, and she understands that he is planning on creating a portal, cutting a hole through the fabric of the multiverse because there's no way they'll get to an official portal station without getting caught. She doesn't understand how he intends to do that, although she suspects there's an enormous amount of detail he's keeping to himself, out of paranoid secrecy or out of a genuine feeling that she's probably not quite smart enough to get it anyway.

She wakes up from a dead sleep, Ford thrashing under her arm, and even after she removes it with a quick apology he continues to struggle. It takes her a moment to realize he's having another nightmare; the other two times, he'd been yelling, but this time he's crying softly, asking Dad to stop, asking Lee to come back. She pulls him upright and wraps an arm around him, rubbing his back and asking him to wake up, and eventually he does, sniffling into his hands, his face turned away even as she hugs him closer. His hair smells like stale sweat and the disinfectant they use on the slaves once a week to keep them from spreading parasites.

"Hey, Ford?" she asks, once he's quieted down. "Who's Lee?"

He's silent for a long time. Ripley would understand if he doesn't want to answer, if she's overstepped her bounds by asking, but he doesn't pull away from her, and eventually he speaks.

"Lee's my twin brother," he says, after a while. She winces at that, not knowing how to respond. "I had- I _have_ two brothers. Sherman's almost ten years older than us, though, so growing up it was just Lee and myself." Ford laughs hollowly, shaking his head. "I've only seen Lee once in the past eighteen years. Ma kept in touch with him, but when she passed I never... I figured someone else would let him know. I-I don't even know if he- if he ever found out where she's buried. I-I'm not even sure he knows she's gone." He sniffs wetly. "The last time I saw him we fought."

"Sounds like you done fucked up," Ripley muses gently, rubbing circles onto the back of his shoulder. "Well, on the plus side though, you have somebody waiting for you, right? And he's used to not hearin' from you for years and years, so it won't be so fucked up when you get back to him."

"What makes you think I want to see him ever again?" Ford asks miserably, and Ripley doesn't know how to respond to that without sounding creepy. Instead she sighs, putting her chin on top of his shoulder.

"Sometimes I think I'd give anything to know if I had siblings. To remember what my family was like," she mutters. "But what I do remember isn't... good. I know I was living on the street for a while after high school, up until I got taken off-planet. If I had a family- a real family, people who cared about me- that wouldn't have happened, right? I always figured family's the place where if you have nowhere else to go, they have to take you in."

Ford's silence is broken only by a shuddering sob, which he stifles quickly. Ripley pats his back.

"Don't worry about that now, Professor. If your brother wants to be a family again or not, we still have to get home first. After that, and after we look Lee up to see where he's at, then you can worry about whether he wants to be family with ya. One thing at a time, though. Deal?"

It's only then that Ford stiffens and pulls away from her, and Ripley's more than a little worried that she's been away from Earth so long that she's accidentally saying something terrible.

"Go back to sleep," he says quietly. "I'll be working on our plan."

"If you say so," Ripley replies, and he doesn't call her out on the fact that she just lies down and watches his back for a couple hours.

Ford and Ripley have another match in a couple of days, and neither of them gets hurt too badly. Devaaki comes and pulls Ripley aside after, speaking in low, urgent tones. She makes a face, but Ford waits until they get back to her cubby before asking what that was all about.

"Well, usually this is a fighting thing, you know? It's rare, but somebody in the audience wants to do some kind of, ugh, meet and greet." She shudders, and Ford couldn't know, not for sure, but judging by his face his assumptions about what such a 'meet and greet' would entail both horrify and anger him. She doesn't want to try to make him feel any better because she doesn't necessarily want him to think too hard about it. "Anyway, it's not usually somebody who wants a human, but I guess this person's a high roller. Must know a little bit about humans, too, because they asked for the female."

"There has to be some kind of way out of it," Ford says, frowning and running his hand through his hair. "Couldn't you... couldn't you say your husband objects to you being alone with this person? Maybe if I'm with you it won't be so..."

"That's sweet," Ripley says quietly, because it is. "Look, they're probably not going to do anything _weird_ weird. And if they intend to be... weird, Ford, it's... it's better if you're somewhere safe." She pats him on the arm. "But look, this is only the second time this has happened since I got here, and the last time it was just some funky robotic brain being who wanted to watch me breathe and wiggle my toes for a few minutes. I'm sure it'll be fine. Just, you know, keep working on what you're working on."

"[Hey, Savage, it's time to go,]" Devaaki says, popping his frilled head into her cubby. The normally introverted Tacidian curls a single appendage around Ripley's hand on the way, and even if he won't or can't tell her that he thinks it's going to be bad, she knows him well enough to appreciate the gesture in spite of the sudden spike of anxious terror this muted attempt at comfort implies. When she steps through the doorway he stays behind, and it's another small comfort knowing he'll be there to take her ~~home~~ back to Ford.

The room is dark but she can see the Chlorovidian standing against the wall, and for a moment she's relieved. Chlorovidians as a rule aren't meat-eaters and reproduce asexually, so the main two things she's frightened of look like they're off the table.

"You're the one who wanted to meet me, right?" she asks, and the Chlorovidian turns to face her, and instead of the smooth, pupil-less gray eyes all Chlorovidians have they're bulging and bright gold, with huge black slits.

"Oh yeah, I'm a BIG fan," it says in English, grinning.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Ford doesn't yet have the knack of telling time here without Ripley's help, but it feels like a few hours before she's escorted back. He recognizes Devaaki at one side, supporting Ripley's weight, and Ripley herself is-

_-paler than he's ever been, eyes wide, tie askew, "Where are these ideas coming from? Who are you working with?!" but Fiddleford cringes back like a struck dog when he reaches out-_

-Devaaki is saying something but Ford can't understand it. Her mouth is slack and her pupils are blown wide open, eyes unfocused as the alien presses her limp body into Ford's arms.

"Ripley? Hey, hey, look at me, come on," he urges, fumbling to get her into the bunk. She presses her face into his chest and sobs quietly, her arms wrapping around him, her fingertips pressing through his shirt hard enough that it feels like it's bruising. Ford doesn't know what to do, doesn't know what's right to give, what's needed, and it's a twist of shame in his chest that he's just as scared of not knowing what to do as he is of whatever he suspects happened. "Ripley, does anything hurt?"

She sucks in a shallow breath, unable to focus on him for more than a few seconds before her glassy gaze crawls towards the corners of the room.

"W-we," she says, her voice shaking. "We need to go. We need to get out of here."

"Shh, shh, I know, I'm working on it," he says quietly into the top of her head. "It'll be soon, Ripley. Very soon."

"No," she hisses. "Not soon. Now. Today. Ford... S-stanford." She takes in a gulp of air, shaking her head and raising her hands to her face. "We're in danger. You more than me."

"What do you mean?" Ford asks, carding his massive hand through her hair to check her scalp for any signs of a head injury.

"He told me to draw you a picture," she whispers, shuddering. "I don't think I can. This guy said he's gonna hunt you down, Ford. He said he was going to show you things- _lots of things_ \- and he said, he said-" She pulls away, her eyes finally starting to focus as she takes in the expression on Ford's face. "It- it doesn't matter. Professor, what's the actual plan?"

"Well- it's still in the theoretical stages, of course, but essentially if I can find a way to increase the power on the energy sword I should be able to reconfigure the beam such that it splits apart the very fabric of reality in order to allow us to escape through the hole!" Ford catches the look on her face, and wonders if it would be inappropriate to smile. "Of course, I've already rewired your sword to be able to accept this amount of energy without exploding- you're welcome- and-"

"Ford, h-how much power are we talking about?" she interrupts, eyes wide.

"Well, do you know of Tsar Bomba? Essentially-"

"Jesus _Christ_ , Stanford!" Ripley puts her face in her hands again, laughing hysterically for a few seconds before she manages to control herself. Ford frowns, unsure if the strange broken sound is bothering him more than being doubted by this- well- uneducated person, to put it kindly. Ripley sniffles, looking over at him over her fingers, which are still pressed to her mouth even as she speaks. "Ford, no, you can't be serious. Exactly how were you planning on getting that power?"

"Oh, I assure you, creating an explosion of appropriate size will only take a matter of a few hours, once I have the proper supplies. No, don't worry about that, what I need to focus on is shielding so we aren't caught in the explosion when harvesting its energy," he explains, remembering to use smaller words that she can grasp. By the disbelieving stare on her face, he's not sure if he succeeded in explaining. "See, we'll need to be close enough to use the energy but-"

"You're just going to kill everyone here to get us out?" she asks desperately. "S-stanford, you know most of the people here are slaves, right? And we're in the middle of a city, I mean- you cannot blow up an entire city to-"

"I'm sorry, but do you even comprehend the amount of power that is needed to literally rip open a hole in the universe and propel two people into another one?" he asks, reminding himself to try not to be irritated with his traumatized associate. "If we truly do need to leave this dimension in a hurry, we'll either need to harvest that power ourselves or use an existing channel."

"Professor, there has to be a better way," she sighs, wrapping her arms around herself. "Look, there's at least one trafficking portal here for supplies and transit and shit, right?"

"Yes, but all anyone has to do to bring us back here is follow us through, it would take a matter of seconds to be recaptured," he begins, and she holds a hand up, still shaking from whatever it was she saw.

"But that portal uses the same amount of power you need, right? So c-can't you just hook the sword into whatever it is that gives the portal its energy and piggyback offat?" Ford opens his mouth to object, then closes it with a curt nod.

"It'll be dangerous, the two of us wandering around in search of this power source," he says slowly.

" _More_ dangerous than standing at ground zero of an enormous nuclear explosion, man?" She looks over at him, and he can't interpret the expression on her face, blurry as it is from that distance. "F-ford, at this point I would take dying over staying here, knowing that... that thing can get me."

"Ripley, even if... even if we do get to the power source and successfully open a portal out of this world, we don't know where it will take us. There are infinite universes. We don't even know if we'll end up in a universe that has the capability to get us to the next world," he says, after a minute. "We may end up in a terrible situation, regardless. If we wait, we could try to find a way to solve that long-term problem while we're here. If we rush into this, we don't know what we'll be doing."

"Look... I've been away from home for ten years and a slave that entire time, and I don't know that I've ever had hope to go back to Earth, our Earth. Even if we don't get there, at this point, just knowing I'm a universe away from that guy will be enough for me." Ripley shakes her head, tears welling up in her eyes.

"Ripley, what did this... person..." Ford trails off. She looks at him for a long time, tugging fretfully at a lock of blonde hair.

"He- I don't know how to explain it. He said he wanted... you. He didn't say your name or anything, but he made himself... obvious." She looks at his hands, but doesn't touch them. "He wanted me to let him take over my body, the way he took that poor Chloro, and when I said no he started hurting himself, he sh-showed me things-"

"Who? Ripley, what was his name?" Ford demands. Five years since he last saw the demon, surely...

She puts her index fingers together, overlays her outstretched thumbs to form a shaking triangle, and his heart leaps into his throat. _No. Not here._

"He got mad, Ford- h-he got so mad, I wouldn't say yes, he got so mad," raising the triangle to her face, centering it over one unblinking eye. "He said to draw it so you'd know, b-but Ford, I can't, I can't, I-"

"You don't have to," he says urgently, pulling her closer. She bites back another sob, running her hands back over her hair, and- not for the first time- he is vividly reminded of the last friend he lost to Cipher. Ford supposes this makes her his friend, too.

"We're getting out of here as soon as possible."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Ripley, it turns out, needs a couple of hours before she's good to walk anywhere, and she actually falls asleep waiting for Ford to finish whatever he's doing to her gear to make it capable of cutting through the fabric of spacetime. Her dreams are confusing and awful- gray concrete floors and walls that stretch up forever to a velvet-black sky, the night heat bearing oppressively down on her, and flashes of gold and that awful laughter, the echoes bouncing around as she tries to run from shadowy figures.

When Ford shakes her awake it's a blessing, and she is quick to dress and pack what little she owns of importance. She isn't totally sure how they're going to pinpoint the location of the portal drive's power source, but Ford's quick to show her how her sword has sensors in it already, and that he changed them to be able to pick up the power signature of the type of energy used in the portals.

"Like one of those clicking radiation measuring things," she murmurs, impressed.

"That's called a Geiger Counter," he tells her, visibly pleased. He offers to tell her how he modified her sword, but realizes that will have to be a conversation for another time. Ripley makes a mental note to ask him about it later, since he really- _really_ really- seems to like telling her how stuff works.

Despite everything that's happened in the past day, Ripley is... not excited, not quite, but there's an electricity under her skin that she can't remember ever having felt before. Something is changing and it's not due to some stranger- she and Ford are actively shaping the next step in their lives. Even if it's bad, it's the first time she knows of since she ran away from home as a kid that she's the one making decisions on what her life is going to do next.

She registers the shape standing just beyond the doorway to the utility corridor at the same time that Ford does, but she recognizes it first because she's known him longer.

"Devaaki," she says softly, stepping in front of Ford. "[You saw what happened to me earlier. We're... we're friends, aren't we?]"

"Ripley Savage," he says slowly, and yes, it sounds off, he seems strange, but Ripley knows he's... disappointed that she's trying to leave? Going to miss her? Glad that she's getting out of this? She knows they're friends but their friendship has always been defined loosely, by a bare sketch of what she remembers of her youth and the impossibly alien culture he's too shy or private a person to explain. He's tried, because she's tried. He taught her Tacidian when they both realized his mouth parts were incompatible with her language, he spent months of his life teaching her how to fight and win, rather than lashing out and hurting herself. She knows he knows he'll be retired soon, and that Tacidian's don't have a word for "apprentice" but they do have one that means "replacement."

"Trying to leave, huh?" he asks slowly. "You really are an idiot. What do you see in her, Sixer?"

Ford realizes it before she does, leveling his laser raygun at her friend, and she doesn't understand it until he steps closer and there's purple-black ichor oozing from the ragged tears in his mouth where his mandibles sliced his tongue open for using English. She can't see his eyes but she knows.

"What are you," she breathes, igniting Ol' Sparky, the first and best thing Devaaki ever gave her.

"You mean ol' Fordsy didn't tell you?" the thing wearing Devaaki burbles, dark blood staining and matting the fur on his face and chest.

"It's a being of pure energy, Ripley, a demon," Ford says, and his voice is shaking and tired, and Ripley is sick of it, sick of hearing it laugh. "Your friend is... still in there, but his body has been hijacked by-"

"Hijacked? Is that what you crazy kids are calling it nowadays?" Devaaki's body laughs harshly, mechanically. "You mean you didn't jump into this with your eyes wide open, Pines? Hey kid, why don't you ask him how we met? Or better yet- why don't you ask him how you're going to get me out of your friend if you two are off in some other dimension?"

"Ripley, I-" Ford begins, and she understands immediately that they can't, that it's either stay here to force that demon out of Devaaki or escape, and Ford sounds defeated already.

"[Devaaki, you're still listening in there,]" she says quietly. "[And he says it's stay and save you from life as his puppet, or go and let you be consumed by him.]"

"You do know I can understand you, lady," the thing wearing Devaaki chuckles. Ripley fights back the urge to shoot an evil look his way, knowing Devaaki can still see her from... where-ever he went.

"[Remember when I tried to make your words match the words from my home, and you said it was an unsolvable riddle? Remember that story I told you from my home dimension about the Gordian Knot?]" She smiles thinly. "[You don't have a word that means what I want to say, but... I care about you, Predecessor.]"

Understanding dawns on Devaaki's face, and fury, and in his prime he would have stopped her but he's old and bleeding out from the mouth, and there's nothing Devaaki or the demon inside him can do to stop her blade from parting his head from his neck, and the corridor is full of the smell of blood and burnt flesh and burnt fur.

"Let's go," she snarls, grabbing Ford's coat and dragging him past the steaming corpse of her only friend. They don't speak, either of them, until they get to the power source, and even then it's just Ford telling her to pass her sword over. Alarms are already ringing, and it's only a matter of time before they're found, and when Ford cuts open the air next to him he looks at her for just a second, but it's the longest second she's ever known.

_He will betray you, he doesn't care about you, you have to know that, you're less than nothing to him, just ask what he did to his own brother_ , and it's the same awful voice from her dreams, the same manic cackling. She knows without a doubt that Ford's going to leave her here.

He grabs the front of her coat and yanks her into the hole alongside him.

The wasteland they've landed in is cold and empty, a starry sky above and a dying savanna dotted with trees and distant mountains along one edge.

Ripley sinks to her knees next to Ford and she can't stop crying.


	3. No Rain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I just want someone to say to me, oh,  
> I'll always be there when you wake, yeah.  
> Ya know, I'd like to keep my cheeks dry today,  
> So stay with me and I'll have it made."
> 
>  
> 
> -Blind Melon, "No Rain"

Ford lets three days of silence pass between them. Finding supplies, finding safe food and clean water and protection against the elements, that has to come first, and he's glad that Ripley's silently following his lead, but he keeps catching her looking his way when she thinks he isn't watching.

He considers breaking that silence, but it's Ripley who takes the first step.

"My sword's been clicking ever since we started heading east," she tells him, poking a stick into the weak, foul-smelling fire. "Guess we should head that way."

"That's a good plan," he muses, glancing nervously at her. Even close up it's hard to read her face, but at this distance her features are a single pale smudge in the darkness.

She scoffs, and continues poking.

"So..." he starts, and she gives the fire a ferocious jab, sending up sparks.

"So tell me something," she says, still not looking in his direction. "Multiple doctorates, huh?"

"...twelve," he confirms, and she whistles.

"Twelve doctorates by the time you were thirty-two? Man, you wa'n't playin' when you went to college," she says.

"Actually- actually I was twenty-six, see, I-" he starts, and she barks out a mirthless chuckle.

"That's... that's precious. So anyway," she continues ruthlessly, "you have the qualifications to teach basically most of a college education, then."

"I hadn't really looked at it that way," he admits. Ford opens and closes his hand a few times. "I was purely a researcher when I became... lost."

"Have you thought at all about what you'll do if... when you get back homeside?" she asks, staring into the fire.

"Well... by now I've been missing for five years. Even if I do get back, I'm not sure how I'd explain it. I had a research grant," he adds glumly. "I have a strong feeling I've long lost it."

"Yeah, I think if you're gone two more years you can be declared legally dead," she says helpfully. "Assuming there's someone around who cares to, I mean. I might legally still be alive, but I don't remember my original name, so I'll basically never know, right?"

"There must be some way of regaining your lost memory," Ford says, sitting up.

"Don't ask me how I know, but I bet your doctorates, none of'em is for Neurology, huh," she mutters, and he can see the wide grin even from here. "I don't think... I mean, what do I know, but I haven't gotten any of my lost memories back in the last ten years."

"Yes, but that might be a case of you not knowing what memories are lost in the first place. I mean, yes, the big things, but there might be a laundry list of things you didn't know you'd forgotten until you remembered," he says, perking up. She snorts a little at his tone.

"Okay, Professor, test me. I had what I assume is a normal high school education, so hit me with stuff I should know, right?"

"Alright, we'll start with an easy one- who were the last ten presidents of the United States of America?" he asks, rubbing his hands together.

"Um... okay, so... Bill Clinton, George Bush, Ronald Reagan..." She pauses, not noticing the way Ford's smile has frozen into a confused rictus grin. "Jimmy Carter... Gerald Ford? That sounds right but we're hitting before-I-was-born territory... Oh, wait, Richard Nixon's in there somewhere, then... JFK? Shit, I don't know who was before JFK," she adds, laughing. "Maybe I wasn't a great student, huh?"

"Lyndon B. Johnson was before Nixon and after JFK," Ford says quietly. "Before JFK was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Before that is Harry S. Truman."

"Aw, see. I was close. Seven out of ten is... not passing, is it?" Ripley laughs again. "Well, to be fair-"

"You've been away from our dimension for five years longer than I have," he interrupts. "But I was last home in 1982. That would put you at being taken in 1977, sometime during Jimmy Carter's presidency."

"What?" Ripley says blankly. "But- no, wait. I would have been two years old in '77." Ford immediately draws back from her, mind racing, and he can't see her face too well in the light. "Y-yeah, I'm pretty sure I was taken in 1994, and I know I was nineteen. Ergo- born in '75."

"I'm twenty-five years older than you are!" he cries, horrified.

"Bull-donkey, you are definitely not in your fifties yet," she counters. "You're only seven- eight?  Eight years older than me. We did the math on day one, Ford."

"No, we- oh, don't you see?" he asks, bouncing to his feet. "Our personal timelines have intersected out of chronological order! Theoretically, we could have been taken at the same time on the same day and still have had different lengths of time experienced- but instead-"

"Instead, what should be 1987 for you is 2004 for me?" she asks, standing up with a quiet _oof_ noise that he pretends not to notice. "So we might get back to Dimension 46'\ and it could be literally any time, even years and years before we ended up actually leaving?"

"Well... theoretically, yes," he says, deflating slightly. "But we know that didn't happen."

"You mean to tell me if you were faced with a time paradox situation where you would interact with your past self knowing it didn't happen the first time, you wouldn't try to do it to see what happened?" Ripley presses. "Because let's be honest here, Stanford, you strike me as a certain type."

She doesn't know about the portal, about the deals, about Fiddleford- well, unless Bill told her. Still, Ford bites back the urge to respond, knowing it's not exactly a wrong assumption.

Instead he decides to go back to go back to their original conversation, testing to see what she remembers of her life in Dimension 46'\\- or, at least, her formal education.

Three hours later, by the time they mutually agree they need to get some sleep, she has forgiven him of whatever it was that had kept her silent since arriving here, and is sleeping with one arm clutched around his chest. Ford doesn't sleep, sure that the second his guard drops she'll roll over and her eyes will be huge, golden, slitted like a cat's, mouth wide in a predatory smile-

Ford doesn't sleep.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It's another week in what Ripley keeps calling Purgatory Dimension. They eat a lot more snakes and insects than Ford would have been prepared to eat, but compared to the rationed protein jelly Ripley's been eating for the better part of two years it's... well, still not ideal, but it's nice to get some variety. She avoids talking about what happened back ~~home~~ in the last dimension, has one traitorous thought about Devaaki and meeting with that demon again- "Hello! My name is Ripley Savage! You killed my father, prepare to die!"- and she can't even joke with Ford about it because she doesn't want to get into having to explain the very existence of The Princess Bride.

They talk more, at least. He asks her what her birthday is and she doesn't know but she thinks it's in the winter, so- like a dork- he gives her one, December 15th. When he reveals his is June 15th, exactly six months earlier, she gives him a playful punch to the arm and he smiles faintly. He tells her about Glass Shard Beach, New Jersey, and about Backupsmore University in Missouri, and Gravity Falls, Oregon. She tells him about Atlanta, and about what she remembers from a trip she knows she took at some point that hit various Civil War battle sites, and about watching the Ken Burns Civil War documentary. They both remember watching Cosmos, and she's glad to report that Carl Sagan is still alive as of 1994. They commiserate over how good The Empire Strikes Back is and, because she forgets what year Return of the Jedi came out, she ends up telling him the entire plot, acting out quite a bit of what she remembers. She tells him about John Savage and he tells her about the ragtag family of refugees who gave him his Universal Translator. She tells him about The Guy with the Van and he tells her about Fiddleford McGucket.

She thinks they're getting close to whatever power source her sword's sensors are picking up, and he agrees. She sleeps with her head on his shoulder, and yes, a part of her knows he's not used to that kind of thing and that it's harder for him to sleep, but every time she closes her eyes she sees that thing wearing Devaaki's face, and she doesn't tell Ford.

She wakes up before he does and for once, he's the one clinging to her, his broad hand curled around her waist, his face buried against her neck. Ripley waits for the sun to rise higher, taking mental stock of the situation. On the one hand, it's nice to be cuddled, she likes and even admires Ford a whole awful lot, and he's a pretty good-looking guy for a human... she thinks. On the other hand, it's sweaty and his hair and shaggy beard are tickly-scratchy. Their backs are both too old to be comfortable sleeping on the ground, and he somehow managed to pin her down in an even more uncomfortable position.

She isn't sure if she wants him to stop or to do it every night. She grins up at the cloudy sky as the sun continues to rise.

"Hey, wife. Wifey," she hisses, delicately removing his hand and putting it over on his own side. "Pssst. Wife. Wake up."

"You're the wife," he mumbles into her skin, and that _really_ is ticklish. She swats at his arm as he starts to wake up, rolling away from him to pull herself up and stretch her sore and aching back.

"No, I distinctly remember calling you my wife first. That shit's legally binding in the Purgatory Dimension," she informs him as he sits up, rubbing his eyes and looking awful. She pulls out her sword and holds it at arm's length, swinging it slowly around until she decides it's clicking more frequently in any one direction. She draws a rough arrow in the dirt with the toe of her boot and puts the sword away. "Come on, we should be up to our next stop soon, Ford."

She hopes it's soon. She feels like they're just... biding time. She watches the horizon and feels uncomfortable with the fact that there's nowhere for the two of them to hide. The ground becomes rocky mud, with odd calcified plants and crusted-over rocks. The sword's sensors click at her, and Ford doesn't talk much as he walks, and she wishes she could say something intelligent or important.

Ford only really seems to come alive when they reach the edge of a huge active caldera, with what looks like miles of steaming flat pools and bubbling mudpots. He starts chattering right away, even though the heat- while not yet oppressive- is seeping into the very fabric of Ripley's being, it feels like. It smells like rotten eggs, and none of the water even looks remotely safe to drink, and Ripley would wrap an arm around him and make him leave if it wasn't for the fact that her sword is no longer clicking, just letting off this kind of low-pitched whine. She lets Ford take it and he goes and does his thing while she follows alongside and tries to find a safe place to sit or step. He almost loses a foot when he gets over-excited and almost steps into a geyser pool.

She takes his word for it when he comes to her, literally redhanded because he got scalded through the protective gloves, with a cluster of crystals the color of dishwater, each with a small spark of green-orange iridescence deep within, and tells her that he's found a power source they can use for several more dimensional hops.

The fear from the first time is still there- _he's going to leave you, ask about what he did to his brother_ \- but she lets him take Ol' Sparky again to set up the portal. This time, he takes her by the hand when they step through.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Ford tries not to feel happy.

The next world is kind of nice- peopled largely with mansized rodents, but otherwise pretty nice. They have indoor plumbing and showers, they have carpeting and trees and people who move around at their leisure and nobody who actually seems to be a slave. Ford gets his hands on a shaving kit and Ripley blushes and calls him Baby-Face Nelson once his beard is gone. The first time someone offers them bread- hot, fresh from the oven, riddled with foreign grains in the fluffy inner dough- Ripley breaks into tears. Ford doesn't know what to do about that, about her crying her eyes out over a meal, their rodent hosts giving each other polite, strained smiles.

The rodents make Ford a pair of glasses, and it doesn't fit quite right but for the first time in weeks he can see properly, and it's wonderful. He can see Ripley's face, the pearly white of her scar, the way she nibbles at her lower lip when she's thinking, the way she squints and brings books and papers nearly to her nose in order to read.... After a short discussion, the rodents also make Ripley a pair of glasses, and she spends the better part of a day horrified and amazed to realize that she's meant to be able to see things like leaves on trees and street signs.

They are supplied with everything they might need. Clean changes of clothing, traveling cloaks, bags. Something that writes like a cross between a pencil and a china marker, a couple of reams of something that resembles vellum. Ford makes himself a journal to start keeping notes in, and keeps the rest of the supplies in case he or Ripley want to use it for anything.

There are no weapons like anything he or Ripley already has, but they are given camping knives to go with the slim cooking pan and simple tent.

They really... they have no reason to stay, and Ripley is withdrawn during the days they are in the Rodent Dimension, and Ford tries not to feel happy to be there, and tries not to feel happy when it's time to leave.

"What's wrong?" he asks her on their last night. They are in separate beds- roughly the length of singles, but nearly square-shaped.

"Not used to havin' this much space to sleep on, I guess," she says, curled under a duvet, her back to him.

"I mean, technically we had a huge sleeping space every night in the Purgatory Dimension," he offers, trying for a joke. "Basically the entire planet, even!"

"Yeah, but that doesn't count, I had you on me," she counters.

"I mean if you want to be accurate it was more that I had you on me," he replies, sitting up. He puts on his glasses- wonderful!- and looks over at her. Her hair is clean, in an uneven braid that lies heavy across the weirdly-shaped narrow pillows people use here. She rolls over onto her other side to face him, one arm tucking the duvet up around her chest, and Ford feels a surge of affection, all the more unusual because she's not doing anything in particular and they're not experiencing a period of heightened stress and he knows with her glasses on the nightstand she can't even see the expression on his face from here, just a set of reflective lenses over a pale oval in the dark.

"What are you thinking about, Ripley?" he asks softly.

"I didn't know I needed glasses," she says, after a prolonged silence. "I don't think I aged into needing them, because I think I always did and just never got any."

"Oh," he says, and tries to imagine. "My brother and I have worn glasses since we were five or six years old. Well... I have. My brother usually lost or broke his... then he hit his teen years and outright refused."

"Sherman or Lee?" she asks sleepily. "Also, did your parents intentionally name your brothers after Civil War generals?"

"Lee," he replies, flabbergasted, "and- no? I don't believe so? Sherman's usually called Shermie anyway, and Lee's short for- short for something."

"Weird," she says, giving him a half-smile. As he watches, the smile fades into a puzzled look, and she props herself up on one elbow to point accusingly at him. "Short for... wait, are you gonna tell me that your parents named you Stanford and Stanley? Honestly that's what they named you, twins?"

"Well I wasn't gonna tell you, but, uh, yes. And yes, I know what you're about to say, and I agree, it was fucking awful," he says consolingly.

"Stanford and Stanley," she marvels, dropping back onto the bed. "Wonders never fuckin' cease with you, Professor."

At least she's smiling. That's something.

The next world is dark and cloudless, all the time. It's not nearly cold enough to not have a sun or sunlight, but enough time passes- Ripley tells him about eighteen hours, her internal clock is still better than his- and they realize they simply can't waste more resources searching in the dark for something they don't know exists.

They come to an agreement in a dystopian underworld, fighting for their lives after their weapons- including Ol' Sparky- are taken. She teaches him everything she can in a short amount of time about fighting, and then- after they recover their gear and get out of the building, out of that terrible dimension altogether- she makes sure they spend an hour every day practicing how to fight if they are disarmed again. He demands then that he spends an hour a day teaching her a hodgepodge of physics, engineering, and chemistry so that if anything ever happens to him, she can still get herself to another dimension.

Ford tries not to feel happy when they sleep tucked against one another on the ground, outdoors, sharing warmth because that's the rational thing to do. It's easier to sleep near her if his arm is her pillow, propping her head up to keep her from snoring so much, his other arm pulled around her middle to keep her from rolling over.

Every time he wakes up with a nightmare she's already awake, sitting up and watching the perimeter, her arms looped around his shoulders, his head against her chest where he can hear her heartbeat. Sometimes he seeks out one of her hands and she never hesitates to lace her fingers with his.

He tries not to feel happy.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The next dimension is bizarre- it's extremely empty and everything is splashed or crusted over with something that looks like dirt-colored amber and smells like an open sewer, but under the filth and silence it looks like Earth. Ripley's heard of those, parallel Earths where different people did different things through history, where meteors zigged instead of zagged, where the changes were so drastic or so minor that it was literally impossible to figure out when the timelines diverge. They appear in this dimension in an alleyway between two buildings, a car like nothing either of them has ever seen crushed into one of the walls. It looks like someone's still behind the wheel. They climb over it, despite the awful stench coming from inside and around it, and the street they come out on is kind of cute in an old-timey Fifties way.

Next to her, Ford gasps sharply, grabbing her hand so hard that it leaves a bruise.

"We're home," he mutters, his voice small, soft, defeated. "It's home. I know this place, Ripley, this is the town I grew up in. It looks like... it looks just like it did when I was a kid."

She looks at him, then around, adjusting the unfamiliar weight of her glasses as she takes in the town around them.

"Stanford, it's... everything is totally abandoned," she says quietly. She doesn't try to take his hand off of hers, just pulls him along with her as she goes up to the nearest glass storefront. It's nearly opaque with dirt and dust, and even after she wipes it with her sleeve it's too clouded-over to look inside. His hand goes limp, so she grasps it herself, running her thumb over the first knuckle. "Come on, let's figure out what year it is here."

He follows, and he's so quiet that shivers of discomfort roll down through Ripley's body every so often, and she avoids looking at the expression on his face as he takes in his surroundings. The next couple of doors are either locked or stuck shut with that horrible-smelling stuff, and Ripley starts to consider pulling her sword out to try to cut into a doorframe when Ford gives her hand a little squeeze.

"Sorry," he says quietly.

"S'alright, s'fine," she tells him, and he points across the street to a building that looks relatively clean.

"That diner used to keep newspapers in a stand near the counter," he tells her, so they go. It's not even too hard to force the door, and the air inside is stale and smells bad, but not as bad as the car in the alleyway. The newspapers break apart when they try to pick them up, but on the third try Ford's able to get up up to the light. The paper is called the Holy Seaside Chronicle, and America is the United Lands of the Son, a helpful map printed on the first page pointing out huge patches of land where the "Unclean" have been "Purged" and where it's still not safe in the "Unfertile Lands." The date on the newspaper is December 21st, 1954.

Ford pushes the paper away, staring down at it as it crumbles against the sagging linoleum counter. Ripley puts a hand on his shoulder, and she's the one who says it.

"Ford, this isn't home," she says gently. "We never lived here. It's not ours. This world ended before we were even bor-"

"No," he interrupts, eyes wide. "We- I would have been four and a half when this happened. Shermie would've been almost fifteen!"

"Ford, no," she says, taking his hand. "Shermie's still alive in 1982 when you get taken into the portal, right? You lived, your brothers lived. This place isn't _your_ place."

"I have to see them," he says, hanging his head. "I just... please. I have to see them."

"Stanford, think about it," Ripley tries. "How long does newsprint have to sit in a relatively closed environment before it gets all brittle like this? How many years?"

"...decades," he whispers. "It'd have to be two or three decades at the very least."

"So even if... even if your ancestors still all got together at the right times with the right people, even if your parents met and had you and your brothers the same way, even if they all survived whatever it was that happened to the world to make it like this, Ford..." Ripley sighs. "They wouldn't be there. They'd have left or... or they wouldn't be there. Right?"

Ford doesn't say anything, his shoulders tense under her hands.

"Tell you what," she says. "We don't know how far back the changes are, right? So we go to your house and if it looks right, we go in. If it doesn't look right, we fuck right off out of here to some better dimension. Agreed?"

"Agreed," he says quietly.

They pick their way through the streets. The names are all wrong but the cracked and sunbleached asphalt is still laid out in the same lines Ford used to travel. There are a few more cars- empty, crusted over with the stinking brown stuff- and near a rusted-out playground Ford stops and stares at an assortment of children's clothing. Most of it is laid out flat or hung awkwardly over the seats of the swingset, discarded children's shoes lying unattended in the dirt, empty socks still half-inside. There's a set of boy's clothing on the slide, and two little brown leather shoes down at the bottom.

Ripley doesn't bother trying to say anything. She can't think of a single thing to say.

He leads her away, down a couple of streets, and it's mostly little storefronts with apartments over them. He stares up at one- Keiferson's Holy Books and Goods- and at the dark, empty windows over it.

"Right or wrong, Stanford?" she prompts.

"Dad ran a store," he murmurs after a while. "Pines' Pawn. Mom had a phone psychic service, with a, a neon sign in the window... I-I don't know when she got the sign, but..." Ripley looks up at the store and the apartment over it, and it's on the tip of her tongue- _fuck this place, Ford, let's get out of here_ \- when they both hear the first sign of life either of them has heard since they got here.

Unfortunately, it's the sound of an inhuman bellow, so loud it echoes around the streets rattling every pane of glass. At the end of the street a... creature, no better word for it, slumps into view around a building. It looks gelatinous and semi-opaque, shaped like a vague approximation of a human torso and arms, dragging itself forward. It bellows again, from an appendage that's a bit off-center and wouldn't have looked like a head to Ripley before it made that awful screaming noise.

"Inside," Ripley says, and it must be loud enough for that thing to hear, because it turns in their direction. It makes it halfway down the street in a sickening scramble in the amount of time it takes Ripley and Ford to cross the sidewalk and break down the front door. Ford half-leads, half-drags her upstairs, turns a corner, and yanks her into a small bedroom-

-two small beds, a scattering of toys and children's drawings, a tent made of a moldering bedsheet hung on a length of rotting twine, a sign pinned to one side reading _FORT STAN_ in childish handwriting-

-Ford lets out a small noise, but the thing crashing through the store downstairs is louder, and the smell is worse than ever, and something brown and wet is seeping in through the windows from beneath the curtains. Ripley unsheathes Ol' Sparky and inserts one of the crystals into the power core with fingers that tremble so badly that she drops it, at first. The crashing noise downstairs is bad enough, and when the thing roars again they nearly jump out of their skins.

"Ford, come on," Ripley pleads, as she finally gets the blade set up to open a dimensional rift. He isn't moving, one hand slightly forward, as if he can't decide if he wants to touch the faded, yellowing paper tacked to the wall with a pair of identical handprints in red and green, the name _STANLEY_ in messy, meandering script, the name _STANFORD_ neatly printed next to it.

Ripley ignites the blade as something starts pounding against the bedroom door, foulness oozing underneath and around the doorframe.

"Ford!" she cries out. Shaking himself into awareness, he grabs onto her arm and when she cuts open the portal they jump through, together.


	4. Down In It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I'll cross my heart and hope to die,  
> But the needle's already in my eye.  
> And all the world's weight is on my back and I don't even know why.  
> And what I used to think was me is just a fading memory.  
> I looked him right in the eye and said goodbye."
> 
> \- Nine Inch Nails, "Down In It"

Some dimensions are easier. Some are harder. It's unsettling how often they enter a dimension where Ford's already a wanted criminal with a growing bounty on his head.

(It's rarer, but sometimes Ripley's on the posters too. She loves it, saving them in her bag when she finds them, calls him the Bonnie to her Clyde.)

She asks him things he wouldn't have thought to ask, like what his favorite color is (burgundy) and what his favorite food is (pancakes) and what flavor birthday cake is best (chocolate, obviously.) She volunteers information in turn- blue, Southern-style egg salad, funfetti. She explains to him what funfetti is and she bickers like ~~Stanley~~ family when he reacts with appropriate horror at the notion.

They watch a Globnar match, fascinated and horrified. They encounter a genuine haunted hotel on an asteroid and spend a week resolving the ghost's unfinished business. They end up in a dimension with a parallel 1920's Earth where dragons are the dominant species.

Just a little over eight months after they first meet Ripley wakes him up with a hot pastry and a steaming mug of tea.

"Breakfast in bed," she explains, beaming. "Happy birthday, Ford."

"It's not my birthday," he says slowly, glancing around to make sure they're still in the motel near the transportation hub in the Flying Sharks Dimension. "They don't share a system of time management with us here, Ripley-"

"-don't be a brat, Professor," Ripley says, grinning. "It's your birthday, I've been counting. Now eat your breakfast so I can give you your birthday present."

He hasn't celebrated his birthday since his seventeenth. He forces himself to eat and smile, and when he's had a chance to get showered and dressed for the day she presents him with a heavy box, wrapped in plain paper with the words " _38! SO OLD!_ " scribbled large across the top.

"So old," he repeats dryly, but when he opens the gift it's a new plasma revolver, with an unusually long grip. Ford's hand fits perfectly around it. "Ripley, this... is... Ripley, did you have this _made_?"

"Yeah," she grins, glancing aside. "Look, we're still, you know, living from moment to moment, so I went with something utilitarian but I promise, next birthday you're getting something purely frivolous."

"I love it," he tells her, and she swoops in for a hug, burying her face in his shoulder.

They find more parts for Ol' Sparky, to make it more efficient, to make the power supplies smaller and faster and easier to find, and after a while Ripley doesn't need help, starts suggesting and implementing changes on her own. They find engineering projects for Ford, investigate every lead they can on 'anomalies' even though Ripley likes to tease him that calling anything an anomaly after what they've seen pass for normal in other dimensions is a choice of semantics. They get blackout drunk in a dimension with tentacle-armed biker piglets and wake up with goofy tattoos; Ripley starts calling him Professor All-Star when she's in the mood to get on his nerves and he calls her Bugs and Thumper and Playboy after the rabbit silhouette tattoo that wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't in such an awkward location.

Sometimes Ford catches her looking at him with such impossible fondness. He doesn't know what to do with it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Some dimensions are tough, but some are better. The list of their crimes, rightfully and wrongfully accused, grows with every dimension they visit.

(The longer it goes on the less it bothers Ford, like it's inconsequential, like it's a nuisance at worst, and even though he can come across as a know-it-all when he gets going it's comforting that he's so confident about this.)

He finds out she doesn't really know any proper jokes, and dedicates a day to teaching her some. A chemist walks into a bar and orders an H2O. A second chemist walks in and says, "I'll have an H2O, too." The second man dies after drinking it. (She needs an explanation, and chuckles politely.) A man walks into a bar with an octopus who can play any musical instrument... (By the time he's finished telling it, they're both awkward, but she snorts a small laugh at the punchline with the bagpipes.) Why can't you hear a pterodactyl go to the bathroom? ("Because they're all dead?" she ventures. "No, because the p is- well, actually, back in Gravity Falls I-")

He gets her by surprise a few hours later.

"You know, I know my ex-wife still misses me," he says, sniffing once, before roaring, "but her aim is getting better!"

Ripley very nearly dies laughing. He tells her later that it was one of the few jokes he ever heard his father tell.

They find a dimension that is literally full of spiders, and they both despise it. They end up getting mistaken for spies and tortured in a lawless dimension, wasting weeks in the hands of pirates before they can escape. ("Why... don't pirates... go to strip clubs?" Ford asks her once it's over, panting and limping, his hands shaking as he puts an arm around her shoulder. They're both covered in blood. Ripley grins despite the missing bicuspid, everything in her mouth red, tears making twin paths down the gore and grime on her face, "Because they're all dead.")

They end up in the Fingers Dimension, and Ford with his twelve is crowned king, which Ripley supposes makes her his concubine or something. The people look at her funny, mainly because she's got ten and not eleven like most upper-class people, and apparently there's a caste system with some folks who have only nine or eight by birth, and even a lower caste of denizens who'd had fingers removed as punishment for some terrible crime. When she points this out to him, he establishes a system of equal rights, so there's that at least. And she and Ford finally get glasses that fit perfectly, although for some reason Ford gets them both dorky glasses like a dad in the 50's would wear. Something eats at Ripley, and she feels bad for not being happy for Ford, because he's happy. They fight over stupid, inconsequential things, tempers flaring without either of them knowing why.

("You're just jealous, aren't you?" he asks miserably, and she gives him a withering glare.

"Yeah, because that's always been my dream, be randomly put in a position of responsibility in a creepy hand-obsessed dimension, you fuckin' got me," she growls. And later,

"For fuck's sake, Ford, you're not your hands! You know that you're not your hands, right?" and she's exhausted and desperate because she's not sure if he does.

"No, Ripley, I know I'm not my hands," he seethes, shoving them into his pockets. "I'm my _brain_." And later,

"You couldn't even begin to understand, I don't even know why I'm trying, there's no point in trying to explain anything to you-" he snarls, wounded.

"I know your life's _so fucking hard_ having to dumb yourself down in order to explain shit to a fucking moron, I'm sorry I'm not smart or educated or anything, I'm sorry I make everything so difficult for you!")

They don't really have a lot in common but being stubborn idiots is one of the few things they do share. They let two weeks of stony silence go by before Ripley rolls over in bed and asks if he's awake.

"Yes," he mutters, and she climbs out of her bed and into his, putting a tentative arm around him and pressing her face against the back of his shoulder.

"You're not just your brain, Stanford," she says quietly. "You're not just important because of how smart you are, or the training you've had, or the ideas you come up with. You're- I mean- Ford, you'd be important even if you didn't have your mind. You know that, right?"

"Of course I know that," he says stiffly. Ripley swallows dryly, this was a mistake, this is- she makes the decision to go back to her own bed a split second before he snags her hand and laces his fingers with hers.

"Maybe I didn't always know that," he offers. "Thank you, Ripley. Look. I said... a lot of things. And... you're not a moron, you're not stupid, Ripley, we wouldn't be able to get along at all if you were. You're... important to me. I'm sorry that I said anything that made you feel like you're not."

"Aw," Ripley says, burying her face in the back of his pajamas. "I love you too, you idiot." An uncomfortable silence falls over them, their nerves still too raw for that to have been the right thing to say. After a few minutes Ford elbows her gently, rolling onto his back.

"Roll over," he mutters gruffly. "You _always_ get to be the big spoon."

"Awright," she replies, and she goes to sleep like that, being held with a big, stupid smile on her face.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

They accidentally-on-purpose start a slave rebellion in the Lizard Rat Dimension. After everything's over, after they barely escape a firefight with their lives and they're watching the native peoples form a system of government, Ford remembers the thing that has been nagging at the back of his thoughts for a week now.

"Hey, Ripley, do you know what today's date is?" he asks casually, pretending to write in his journal.

"Huh? Oh, it's 'cember nineteenth," she says around a mouthful of tools, looking up from where she's at a desk performing some maintenance on Ol' Sparky.

"What?" he splutters. "Ripley, why didn't you say anything?" He digs around in his bag and produces a small, flat box, wrapped in brown paper, and presents it shyly. She gives it a blank stare for a moment before recognition dawns.

"H-happy belated thirtieth birthday, Ripley," he says quietly. "I- this year we're doing utilitarian gifts, right? I included a book on how to do it, so, you know, that could be something you do when you're bored or- I mean-"

Ripley grins up at him over the assorted lockpicking tools, smile so wide for just a flash he remembers gold, _Don't have a heart attack, you're not 92!_ and-

"Ford, you're the best," she says simply, pulling him into a tight hug. It occurs to him that this might be the only birthday gift she remembers having ever been given.

"I'm sorry it's late," he says into her hair, and she laughs a little and squeezes him closer.

"Yeah, yeah, well, next year you'll remember," she tells him confidently, pulling back a little. "And, okay, this is the coolest thing I've ever held in my hands, but what made you think of me when you saw it?"

It's a fair question. Ford asks her to promise not to laugh. (She promises.) Ford remembers he'd been searching desperately, discarding trinket after trinket because nothing felt right, and the train of thought that popped into his head when he found the kit...

Blushing, Ford admits that while yes, he figures it's a good skill to have in their, um, lines of work (how many times have they been locked up now?) and he thought it would be something she's good at (if her prowess with performing maintenance using delicate precision tools on Ol' Sparky is anything to go by) that she happens, maybe, to look quite a bit like the illustration on the Rogue/Ranger dual class supplement page for the D, D, & More D edition he played in college.

Ripley breaks her promise immediately, but she's hugging him again and ruffling his hair as she laughs, and telling him that it's perfect and she loves it.

They end up in a parallel Earth dimension called Dimension ?837~, where everything is the same except everyone speaks an ancient form of Proto-Indo-European and apparently always have, circa 1998. Ripley's translator can barely keep up with it, but Ford's does pretty well. Ripley takes what might be the last chance they ever get to do this and drags Ford to a Blockbuster (she can't read the sign but the blue ticket stub logo is unchanged) and they rent all three of the Star Wars movies. It's actually pretty good, although there's some things that Ripley tells him don't apparently make it into the translation.

They go to Yellowstone together and almost get eaten by a non-anomalous bear. They are rescued by a park ranger, who keeps saying something that their translators mangle into, "Praise Axolotl!" over and over again.

They go to Oregon looking to see if they can get to the last place Ford lived, but they barely make it across the state line before they overhear a couple of kids playing at a rest stop, _Eeny-meeny-miney-YOU_ , and something on the kids' faces creeps Ford and Ripley out. Later, after they're a hundred miles and a new dimension away, Ripley tells Ford that it was weird because the kids were playing in English.

Ford's nightmares feature a laughing shape he hasn't dreamed about in a year.

They start running low on supplies, specifically stuff they need for the portal generator, and they stage a heist in the first decently-equipped dimension they hit. The bounties on their heads increase, although Ripley's still just a side-note on Ford's wanted posters.

They're camping under the stars on a beach- a small, out of the way island in an otherwise bustling dimension, warm blue sand under the blanket they spread out, vivid orange tides that make the same soothing sound as the waves at home- when Ripley asks him if he ever wanted to have kids.

Ford's never really thought about it. He likes kids, certainly. He's never really put much thought into having any- before, back home, his work was his life's focus, and then his terror and paranoia about Bill, and then he was in the Nightmare Realm, and then he's been on the move ever since, never having enough time in one place to put down roots, much less think about starting a family. He tells her all this, and she hums a little at that.

"Suppose you get home alright," she says. "You get home, make it up with your brothers and dad, everyone's happy and you have your life back. Would you then?"

"I suppose I've never really thought about it at all," he replies quietly. He glances over at her- glasses still on so she can see the stars, her comfortably loose SAVAGE shirt folded and put to the side, half of her rabbit tattoo visible above the edge of her utilitarian black trousers, her bare toes buried in the sand past the edge of the blanket. In nearly two years together her tan lines have all but disappeared. He doesn't think about his brother very often anymore, but it occurs to Ford in a hot, prickling flash of discomfort that if Stanley were here, he'd be making a ruckus over the fact that she's shirtless and next to him. Ford wonders if it bothers her that he doesn't feel anything but a self-conscious detachment about it. He wonders if she would have been happier with the twin with _personality_.

He wonders if he's ever heard her talk about stuff like this before- dating. Kids. Marriage. Naked stuff. He thinks he hasn't. He wonders if she's ever felt like he does, like maybe she was doing something wrong. He wonders if this is something they've got in common.

Instead of asking what he wants to know, he asks, "What about you? Do you see yourself having kids?"

"Well, I like kids," she muses, shrugging. "If someone handed me kids to be their, I guess, Mom or Aunt or whatever, I wouldn't be mad about it. I dunno, I never really thought about it before today."

"Yeah," he sighs, and she looks over at him, full of concern.

"You okay? I'm sorry if I- I'm sorry, Ford," she says, taking his hand. "I'm an idiot, I wasn't even thinking about your weird depressing family dynamic shit. God, I'm making it worse!"

"No, no, it's okay, it's fine," he laughs, as she makes a mortified noise and covers her face. "You're not an idiot, I was just thinking. I'm sorry I worried you."

"Alright, well don't make that mopey face unless it's for something that's actually sad, All-Star, you're killin' me," she huffs, taking off her glasses to put them neatly away in her bag. "I'm going to sleep before you emotionally traumatize me any further. Good night."

"Good night," he echoes, and other than the sound of Ripley trying to punch the sand beneath the blanket into a comfortable bed they spend the rest of the night in companionable silence.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The Shapeshifter Dimension is hard- one of the hardest. The creature impersonating Ford gets ahold of his journal and manages to fool Ripley for nearly fifteen minutes while they traverse the darkened forest in search of a road out- she only realizes her grave error when Ford, the real Ford, tackles the shapeshifter to the ground. When they both face Ripley, pleading for her to shoot the other one, she points Ford's pistol between them and takes a deep breath.

"Okay, Ford, answer this: why can't you hear pterodactyls go to to bathroom?"

"Because- they- they-" the one on the left stammers.

"Because they're all _dead_ ," growls the one on the right. Ripley blows the head off the one on the left, which splatters the both of them in stinking blue-black goo and doesn't actually kill the shapeshifter, but they're long gone by the time it starts to reform. She cries herself to sleep and Ford tries to help, he really does, but every time he makes an approximation of soothing noises she imagines shooting the wrong one.

They start spotting the wanted posters more and more often. Ford takes to covering up his face with a hood and scarf under his already-bulky cape, and big goggles that cover up his glasses. Ripley mopes about losing her enormous mane of hair before getting it all buzzed off and wearing a bandana most days to cover up her scar. It doesn't do much to deter the actual bounty hunters following them around, but at least it prevents random concerned citizens from dialing in to the tip line.

Ford's birthday rolls around again. Ripley is prouder of this gift than she is of anything else she's ever done, _including_ winning that fencing competition in the Dueling Dimension, which she understands to be a very big deal there.

"Here you go, Ford, the big three-nine," she says happily, pressing a tiny box into the palm of his hand. "I told you I'd be going frivolous with this one, so here- something sparkly and cool that you'll never, ever use!"

"Haha, okay," he smiles, opening the box. The iridescent glow plays across his stunned features for a few seconds, as he takes in just what it is he's looking at. "Ripley- is- is this an _infinity-sided die_?"

"Yeah," she grins. "Don't throw it or anything, we might spontaneously burst into song or melt into a pile of bat guano or somethin'."

"Ripley!" Ford keeps looking at her, then at the die, then at her again, and his smile is enormous and hilarious. "Ripley, this is- Ripley, I-" He grins down at the box, blinking rapidly. "Ripley, where did you even get this?"

"Well, I could tell you, but then you'd likely have a fit when you realized how many times it would have almost-accidentally been rolled, so let's just say... before today," she teases.

"Ripley- _Ripley_ ," he says, smiling too widely for his warning tone to be taken seriously. She puts a hand over his, smiling when their eyes meet.

"I was trying to find a copy of your dungeons-dungeons dice rolling game," she confesses. "But I kept not finding it- I guess refugees from other parallel Earths keep not bringing it with them, the jerks- and then I got carried away with trying to find something cool to replace the game."

"Ripley, this is the most astounding thing I've ever beheld," Ford promises, beaming. "And I don't even know how you got your hands on something that's been banned in over nine thousand dimensions including every dimension we've ever visited, but I'm imagining an epic journey."

"Yeah, it was basically a Tolkien-style quest, sorry you missed it," she laughs.

The ~~Prophet~~ ~~Soothsayer~~ ~~Future-Vision~~ Mystic Dimension should be an easy one, but it's not. Also, Ripley and Ford never actually settle on a name for it, and the denizens of this dimension just call it "home" so there's no baseline for them to use. The problem is that everyone they meet either "foresaw their meeting" or gets a "vision of horrors yet to come" halfway through the conversation, which is... incredibly frustrating for both of them, although the vast majority of the people they meet do seem awfully nice, even if Ford keeps getting irritated at himself for accidentally calling the older woman running the hostel they're staying in "Ma."

The veiled lady comes to them in the street one day, her face completely covered, even her eyes invisible through the pale violet material.

"The two of you should come in to get your readings done," she says, beckoning them down an alleyway, and Ripley doesn't roll her eyes because that would be rude. (Ford, however, does roll his eyes, because he's rude.)

"Gal, when we walk away, can you at least have the grace not to yell that you foresaw us not doin' it?" Ripley asks, and okay, she's kind of rude, too.

"Neither of those two things will happen," the lady says instead. "Most people in this dimension can only perceive the histories and fates of other natives to this dimension- which is why every reading everyone's given you so far has revolved around the person giving it."

"Makes sense," Ripley says mildly, mostly to annoy Ford.

"Makes malarkey," he says, waving a hand.

"I myself am not from this dimension," the lady tells them. "My readings will be accurate to you." She pulls open her veil and reveals seven eyes, winking four of them.

"EYE... see... what you mean, but sadly we must decline," Ford says, and Ripley elbows him hard.

"I want to do it, Ford. It'll be fun." He sighs and rolls his eyes and they follow the veiled lady, although they both have a hand near a weapon if need be. It's a narrow apartment- a couple of rooms jammed between a hair stylist and a restaurant- and the front room is the one with the small round table, the chair for the veiled lady, and a bench that's surprisingly comfortable once Ford and Ripley- neither of them small people- wedge themselves into it. The lady places a deck of cards on the table, and Ford and Ripley exchange a look of concern.

"Tarot?" Ford asks in a tone of eternal suffering.

"Pandimensional tarot," the lady says, a little too cheerful and serene.

"This should be fun," Ripley says hopefully, jostling Ford a little. "You want to go first?"

"Are you kidding?" Ford says drily. "I'm not wasting time or money on fakery my Ma'd give me for free."

"It may interest you to know that at this very moment, Stanley is saying the same thing," the lady says, her face inscrutable behind the veil. "Although in his case he is shouting it at a commercial for a psychic hotline on the television." They both fall silent, and there is only a quiet shuffling noise to belie the fact that both Ford and Ripley are struggling to pull out their weapons. (It really is a very tight fit.)

"You're not going to shoot me, Stanford Pines," she says calmly. "And you're certainly not going to be doing anything with that energy sword, Ripley Savage. This is one of the safest rooms in all of the multiverse; I'll not have you two ruin my curtains."

"...alright, sounds like you got us, Psychic Lady," Ripley says after a moment.

" _No it doesn't!_ " Ford snaps. "Look, we're not going to trust you just because you're beautiful and know our names and my brother's name, alright?"

"Ohohoho," Ripley says, because there's no way she's not going to tease Ford about _you're beautiful_ when they're alone later. She's not sure why he's so upset- if the lady was a bounty hunter she wouldn't know about Stanley, and if she was some kind of demon like Bill she would... hrm, maybe Ford has a point about that. Still- Ripley feels... relaxed. She's usually got a pretty good sense about these things, and right now all she's really thinking about is that this room smells like the kind of place she vaguely associates with her grandmother's house. It actually makes her feel pretty good, knowing at some point she had a grandmother she was on good terms with.

"Stanford," the lady says patiently. "No harm will come to you whilst you stay in my domain. Not now, not ever." He stops struggling at least, although the scowl on his face is still deeply mistrustful. "My mission is to stop Bill Cipher once and for all. Unchecked, his twisted reign will spread across all of reality, _every_ reality, until the very fabric of existence is rent asunder. Stanford, let me help you."

The silence is downright palpable, before Ford says in a quiet, sullen tone, "Alright."

The veiled lady turns to Ripley. She thinks the lady must be smiling under the veil, although she can't decide what it is that makes her think so. "I believe you volunteered to go first?"

"Uh... yeah, okay," Ripley says in a hushed tone, glancing nervously at Ford. "What do you want me to, uh, what should I do?"

The veiled lady upends the contents of a dark velvet bag into one slim hand and shakes it a few times before tossing it down onto the table. Ripley blinks- it looks like human finger bones carved with runes- she blinks again and it looks like the set of three Yahtzee dice from the game she used to play with the Guy in the Van, two two's and a one.

"Draw five cards and lay them facedown however you like, Ripley," the lady says. Flustered, Ripley lays them out in a half-circle in front of her, glancing anxiously at the lady as she tries and fails to look for some sort of visual cue. The lady says nothing but it must be okay, because she starts right away and flips over a card, the one at the top of the arc, and shows a single sword, descending from a cloudy sky onto a barren mountain range with a blood-spattered crown floating over the tip. She simultaneously flips the two on either side- five snakes curling around a flute on the left, a bare human foot stepping on a single eye on the right.

"Ohhh, that's- graphic," Ripley says faintly. The lady flips the card on the far right- a flat desert cactus with a cluster of bright purple fruits along its edges- and finally the last one on the far left, a pair of pine trees under a starry sky.

"It's nice to see you again, kiddo," the lady says quietly, and then she laughs gently. "I'm sorry. That joke was in poor taste. You just... remind me very much of someone else, whose path was very different from yours and yet in many ways was the same." Ripley shrugs at Ford, not sure what she means by that. The lady continues, pointing at the cards. "The prickly pear cactus. Righteous vengeance. The ace of swords. The den of vipers. The twin pines."

"Those aren't exactly standard tarot cards," Ford rumbles from her side.

"Pandimensional, remember?" The lady dips a shoulder, and Ripley's sure she's smiling beneath the veil. "Here you are, Ripley, and you've achieved and overcome much, but your journey is far from over. Your choices will shape not just your life, but the lives of countless. You write the fates of hundreds, with your hands and the edge of a blade. You can unleash a veritable river of human blood, devour the sun and moon out of the very sky itself, destroy the entire world out of your unbridled fury and thirst for revenge. Just as easily, you are capable of inhuman acts of mercy and compassion, of bridging impossible worlds to save everyone worthy or unworthy, of recreating a destroyed universe. In one parallel universe you are a loving wife and mother, in one parallel universe you are a hardened assassin with the blood of hundreds of people on your hands, in one parallel  universe you are both. There are worlds that no longer exist now because of your whim, and worlds that only exist because of your burden."

"What's that a metaphor for?" Ripley asks, awed.

"I'm not speaking metaphorically," the lady replies. Ripley blinks, glancing over at Ford. He makes a face at her and shrugs.

"Well, I've never had such an exciting fortune read," Ripley says, after a moment of searching hard for something nice to say.

"Chalchiuhtlicue watches over you," the lady says. "And she will lead you back home to 46'\ sooner than you think."

"Chalcha-tlikwah," Ripley repeats.

"No, that's wrong. Try not to do that again," the lady says after a moment.

 "...okay. How much do I owe you?" Ripley asks, rummaging through her pack.

"The titanium bullet casings left over from your slave uprising in the Lizard Rat Dimension will be payment enough," the lady tells her. Ripley's hand freezes in the bag, before she tentatively hands them over.

"What, uh... what do you want those for?" Ford asks, mystified despite himself.

"I'm going to melt them down to install a plate in _someone's_ skull in about twenty-two years," the lady says cheerfully.

"It makes just as much sense as anything else," Ripley mutters, sighing because this is a lot more confusing and less fun than she was hoping it'd be. "Come on, Ford, get your rivers of blood so we can go."

 "I don't want to do the card thing and I've had my palm read before," Ford replies mulishly. The lady opens the front of her veil at that, and he bravely doesn't flinch at the sight of seven unimpressed eyes glaring in his direction. She points a slender finger at him.

"This one's free: the moment you step foot in Dimension 46'\, you create the inevitability that Bill will enter your home dimension and enact Weirdmageddon. Enter your home dimension only when every piece of Bill's prophesized demise falls into place. When next we meet, Stanford Filbrick Pines, you will have lived so many lives that you will not remember this meeting. Also," she adds, in a slightly lighter tone, "just a caution, but a belltower is not the best sniper's nest."

"Well that's good to know," Ford says, exasperated. "At least it was free. Can you please help us out of your furniture?"

"It's a bench, just get up one at a time," the lady says, replacing her veil over her eyes. "Axolotl be with you both."

"And also with you," Ripley mumbles halfheartedly, squishing herself up off of the bench and cracking her back a little. She doesn't look back on their way out, although she sees Ford glance over a few times.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit: I'm a genius. I put their birthdays six months apart and only just realized now that October is not six months after June.


	5. We'll Meet Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when,  
> But I know we'll meet again some sunny day...  
> Keep smiling through, just like you always do,  
> 'Till the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away..."
> 
> \- Vera Lynn, "We'll Meet Again"

Stanford Pines is forty-one years old and he's curled up next to a campfire with Ripley's shin lying across his lap, his earlier protests that she couldn't possibly be comfortable like that have gone ignored, and in petty vengeance he's propping his open journal on her leg knowing full well that her foot will fall asleep from the weight of the handbound book.

"Give me my leg back," Ripley says from the side, over the light clatter of her precision tools as she puts them away.

"Can't. I'm using it," Ford tells her seriously.

"Don't make me take my own leg back, it'll ruin your drawing or whatever it is you're doing," she threatens half-heartedly.

"I'm not drawing, I'm performing some calculations," he says. "As I recall, you volunteered your leg as a lap desk against my recommendations. It's not my fault your leg is doing a good job as a desk, Ripley."

"Professor All-Star, professional asshole," she says flatly. He makes a production of heaving a heavy sigh and lifting his journal, and she pulls away and sits up, stretching her back with a series of pops and cracks that don't sound all that comfortable. He watches her put away her tools and Ol' Sparky, tapping his pen against the open page before him. She catches him staring and raises an eyebrow at him, then resorts to waggling both when he doesn't respond. "What's on your mind, Fordsy?"

"I've been thinking about a couple of things. Say, your birthday's in two months, isn't it? Is there anything in particular you'd like?" he asks abruptly, and she gives him a small smile, shrugging.

"You know what, I think I'd like to try keeping a journal again, since the last one you gave me got eaten and I also never used it much," she says, twisting her torso in a couple of stretches that make deeply disturbing cracking noises. "And I'm still holding out for that funfetti birthday cake, as well you know."

"I'm starting to suspect you made up the existence of this so-called 'funfetti' out of whole cloth just to screw with me," Ford informs her frostily. "If such an abomination exists or has ever existed, I feel like I would have heard about it before now!"

"Oh, really, like that's seriously the most farfetched thing I've told you about the eighties and nineties?" Ripley replies, dropping to the ground to do a few pushups. "What about Jurassic Park, Ford?"

"I told you, if it is about Tyrannosaurus Rexes it would have been called Cretaceous Park!" he says, before twisting in his seat. She's  just giving him that stupid grin she always gives him when she successfully derails a conversation. He clears his throat and refocuses on what he wants to say. "Just... you know, if my calculations are correct, then it would be about four years ago today that you first, ah, claimed me as your wife."

"Yeah, I hope they made a sequel to that mov- what?" Ripley sits up, squinting at Ford over the top edge of her glasses. "Uh... yes. Your math's right. Happy anniversary, Ford."

"Happy anniversary, Ripley," he says, grinning as he pulls something out of one of his coat pockets. She immediately squawks, which is partially why he did it.

"Asshole! I didn't get you anything!" she cries, and he laughs and holds the small box up.

"Yeah, and I know you, you'll end up going nuts and over-compensating for that when our fifth rolls around," Ford replies smugly. "Just take it, Savage."

"Fine, fine-" she grouses, quickly prying the box open. She pauses, taking the glassy, polished blue stone and its chain out of the box and gazing at it with an intensity she usually reserves for picking locks open. "It's... is this a star sapphire? Ford, you- you got me jewelry?"

"Half of a matching set," he says quietly, pulling the chain under his shirt out to show her a similar stone, dangling it from his fingers. "Put it on. As long as we're both wearing them, I'll be able to feel your heartbeat and you'll be able to feel mine."

"You got me _functional_ jewelry?" Ripley asks, her voice strained as she immediately puts the necklace on and clutches it against her chest.

"So we'll always know," he says softly. "In case we're separated or something. It's...  important to know."

"Ford," Ripley sniffs suspiciously, pulling him in for a rough and sudden hug. "I love you too, you jackass."

"Yes, well," he says, clearing his throat.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Sometimes Ford has nightmares before something bad happens. Usually Ripley thinks that's because Ford typically has nightmares, so odds are that if something good happens he'd have had nightmares the night before, too. Sometimes Ford has nightmares about something specific and then something bad happens that he obsessively frets over, wondering if he failed somehow to prevent that bad thing from happening, wondering if there's some piece of Bill in his mind still that sabotages him.

It's hard for her to respond to that. She doesn't know much about Bill- he took Devaaki's body and as far as she's concerned, he killed him. He's tortured people, including Ripley; he's tortured Ford. These are all enough to know everything she needs to know about Bill.

Ford still wakes up from nightmares begging Ripley not to make a deal with him, not to take it, and she doesn't know how to respond to that either.

Then they step into a dimension that is under Bill's dominion- he's not physically incorporated into it, which is a blessing, but triangles and pyramids lie everywhere, plastered onto walls and towering high over buildings with their single eyes gazing at everything in their shadows. They'd leave immediately if they could, but within minutes of their arrival their location is swarmed by officials searching for the illegal portal opening. They barely make it into a makeshift shelter.

Ford curls his arms around his knees and Ripley can feel the necklace he gave her thudding against her breastbone.

"We have to sleep in shifts," he says hollowly. "Someone needs to keep watch for his lackeys."

"That's a good plan," she says quietly. "I'll wake you up in four hours."

"I'm not tired," he snaps, and she puts a hand on the back of his neck, leaning in close.

"In four hours," she repeats. "If it hasn't quieted down out there enough for us to open a portal out in four hours, I'm going to need you to be sharp while you plan stuff. I'm also a much louder snorer and much better at telling time than you are. So. Cuddle down, close your eyes, put your mind all flat and quiet like we practiced with the Zen stuff. Glasses."

She holds out her hand and he grumbles, taking them off and putting them in her open palm. He curls up with his head in her lap and she runs her fingers through his fluffy salt-and-pepper hair until the staccato pounding in her necklace evens out to a steady pulse that matches her own. She doesn't start counting the minutes until she's sure he's asleep.

She is alone in her thoughts for four hours. She's spent most of the past fifteen years alone in her own mind, unable to communicate with anyone for most of it, so this is not new territory. Within the past four years of living like this- stopping here and there for brief sojourns but always moving forward, searching for home in an infinite haystack- she and Ford have had plenty of time to be accustomed to one another's silence. Sometimes one or the other will need to step away and do their own thing. In Ripley's opinion, it makes for a sane whatever-they-have together, and also makes for better conversations when they do meet back up. Sometimes they are apart for an hour, or a day. Rarely- like when they fight- they may need to take a few weeks.

To Ford it's a craving to be alone in himself, something he spent too many years denied. To Ripley it's a relief, well-trodden ground that she thinks of as a part of herself.

Ripley wonders about Ford's brothers, Sherman who now hasn't seen him in over ten years, Stanley who hasn't had a meaningful relationship with him in over twenty. She wonders if they're in mourning or if they'll be the same age when they get back, if it'll be minutes later in 1982 when she and Ford return home. She's the same age now, she thinks to herself, that Stanford was when he fell through the portal, and Ford's the same age Sherman was when they last saw each other.

She thinks to herself:  if we're following Ford's chronology and not mine, then right now it's 1992, two years before I'm taken. What if we end up home tomorrow and there's still a seventeen year old me running around?

She thinks to herself: if we're following my chronology and not his, it's 2009, and that would make his twin brother 58.

She thinks to herself: what if we end up in 46'\ and it's fifty years too late or too early?

Thoughts of timeline shenanigans always give Ripley tension headaches. She pulls out the journal he gave her for her birthday and jots it down- _nonchronological time = fuck that_. She meticulously marks down the date and time, although she's sure she'll forget at some point and start fretting about timelines again. Satisfied with her entry for the day, she tucks it away, waiting.

Ford shifts in his sleep, his face contorting a little. She waits until she can feel his heartrate speed up- maybe about half a minute, his dreams don't usually last all that long- before she gently shakes him awake, one hand over his mouth, like they practiced.

It hurts Ripley's heart to hear him whimper, the soft noises stifled by her hand, but she forces herself to hold steady until he quiets down. She brushes a smooch onto his forehead the moment her hand's gone, and hands him his glasses in the next.

"How l-long?" he asks, and she gives him a pained smile.

"Three hours and forty-seven minutes. Very close. Good job, Ford." He nods distantly. "Are you going to be okay if I take a nap, buddy?"

"I'll wake you up when you start snoring," he says, and she gives him a thumbs' up.

"Good. Good. Alright." She starts to curl up against him but stops when he holds one hand out, with a characteristically prim expression. "What?"

"Glasses," he says, and she blinks a couple of times before handing hers over. She doesn't expect to sleep much, but as soon as her head's down, she's out.

She wakes up suddenly, because she's very, very cold and her ankles and wrists have been restrained. This is wrong. There is something thumping lightly against her sternum, under her shirt.

"Jeesh, I thought you'd be asleep forever, kiddo," the triangle says. "I meant, you slept through being captured, you slept through ol' Sixer begging for your help, you slept through me killing him-"

"No I didn't," Ripley says, relieved to catch him in a lie and unshakable in her faith that she's done so. "No, I didn't, see, because-"

"Because what?" the triangle sneers, his singular eye glowing like a coal. "Because you love him? Because you wouldn't let him die? Newsflash, One Sword- you knew he couldn't-" The triangle pauses, his eye narrowing as she starts giggling softly. "Are you even listening?"

"Nah," Ripley says, after a moment, and the restraints vanish, the filthy dungeon around them vanishes, and in seconds she and Bill are floating peacefully in a cloudy expanse of soothing mint-colored clouds. She beams at him. "I know Ford's not dead, number one. Number two, lucid dreamin's been around since before me or Ford's been alive, Billy."

"Hooboy," the triangle says, waggling one inky appendage. "Well congratulations, you managed to realize nigh-instantly that I, master of the dreamscape, am appearing to you within the dreamscape. You have no idea how long it takes Fordsy to figure this stuff out."

Bill snaps his fingers and the clouds burst into flame, the heat searing Ripley's face. "Not that it'll do you much good."

"Hold on there, kittenwhiskers," Ripley says, snapping her own fingers. An icy drink- she never found out the name but it was probably the most alcoholic thing a human could drink and not die, in her opinion- pops into her hand and she takes a long sip through a colorful curly straw. "Okay, I'm set. You have some sort of evil plan or deal or some shit you want to throw around, Billy?"

"Whoa there, One Sword, what's the rush?" he asks, twirling around her in a dizzying array of light. "I mean, _I'm_ enjoying this- something tells me you'd be a lot of fun at a party- but most one-lifespan-"

"Three dimensional," Ripley cuts in with a toast. He tips his hat.

"- skinsacks like you are always terrified and defiant, all 'No, Bill, you'll never do the thing you've been successfully doing for a billion years!' So-" He pops out of existence and erupts from within her drink, dislodging her curly straw. "-tell me, what stupid plan or trick do you think you and Stanford are hiding?"

"No trick," Ripley says, fishing her straw out of a fire. "I just think- I mean, come on. A billion years? A whole billion? That's a fuckin' long time to be so-called working on getting a physical body, Cipher." She chuckles lightly. "I mean, shit, I'm a brain-damaged, traumatized redneck and it took me like six months to figure out how to run a portal generator. So either you're all talk, or you really don't want to have a three-dimensional form and you're just fucking around because you don't know how to back out of a plan."

"You stupid little speck, once I have a physical form I will be unstoppable," he roars with a thousand guttural voices.

"Says you," she replies bluntly, unimpressed. "Sounds to me like if you really wanted to have a physical body you'd be able to possess anybody in the entire multiverse and do all the work yourself of generating a portal and whoopsy-daisying it into letting you in from the Nightmare Realm. I mean, shit, I can do enough to open a portal that'll fit two people through it, and I'm barely two steps up from a trained monkey."

"Well you're not wrong about that," Bill titters.

"He told me about what you were trying to have him build," she says, generating a chair with a wave of her hand. "He told me about his friend Fiddleford who got his head stuck in the Nightmare Realm, and how when he fell through he had to run from you. That's at least two times right there you could have waltzed your way inta the world and gotten yaself a body. So it's obviously not that you need an open portal to the Nightmare Realm, mister 'I been doin' it a billion years an' that makes me a professional,' it's..." Ripley taps her chin thoughtfully. "You want to bring the whole Nightmare Realm into the world, don'tcha. That's the only way you'd actually have the same power there that you do in your own realm."

"Wow, such deductive reasoning, let me just pull out the slow clap for ya there," Bill intones, methodically slapping his little hands together.

"I don't know why you're being snippy with me, I didn't spend a billion years being too dumb to get something done and needing some human to do it for me," Ripley replies, crossing her leg over her knee. "So why are you fucking with Ford so much? You obviously can't get shit done without his help."

"First of all, it's adorable that you think Six Fingers is the only person capable of ending your world's miserable existence," Bill replies smugly. "And to answer your question- because it's fun! Because I know him better than you do, One Sword. He's stumbling blindly down the path I set for him, and every step he takes gets me that much closer to what I want. But go ahead, One Sword, tell him that I'm letting him exhaust himself so that it's that much easier to destroy him when I finally reel him in. That's definitely going to go over well."

"You-" Ripley stops, staring down at her hands, reaching tentatively for the necklace beneath her shirt. She feels a sick sort of dread, like she already knows what she's going to see when she wakes up. "You didn't come in here to fuck with me. You're obsessed with Ford. You're... letting him watch me have some kind of horrible-looking conversation in my sleep, right?"

"Hey, maybe _you're_ the smart one," Bill cackles. "Hey, want to see a cool trick?"

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Ford doesn't know what to do. Ripley's eyes are open and they're glowing and she's struggling sluggishly against him, and he's trying to muffle her but she's making these awful noises and _they're going to get caught-_

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Ripley opens her eyes to a painful weight on her chest, a hand clamped over the lower half of her face, and the barrel of Ford's favorite gun pressed against her temple. Ford is looking at her like he's psyching himself up to shoot her.

That's _exactly_ what he's doing.

_Ford, stop_ , she tries to plead, but it comes out, "Mmff ffhh!" Ripley grabs him by the arms and squeezes tightly, but the angle's too awkward- she could probably move the hand holding the gun but it'd break his elbow.

Ford takes the safety off. Ripley fights the urge to squeeze her eyes shut at her impending doom, staring directly into Ford's face instead- without her glasses, it's fuzzy, but she's pretty sure he's going to at least check to see that her eyes are hers before blowing her brains out. And if he doesn't, well, that's definitely regrettable but hey, there are worse things to see in your last moments than some mad scientist who loves you. Even if he is the one pulling the trigger.

Ripley isn't sure how much longer she can breathe with Ford sitting on her chest, but after a horrifyingly long pause he whispers, "Ripley?"

"Mmmhh," she grunts, not bothering to try to make word-noises until he's actually letting her talk. He shifts a little and lets go of her face, and she takes a few deep breaths and tries not to let him see that she feels like she just got hit by a bus. The gun is still pressed against her cheekbone.

"Prove you're Ripley, right now. Prove you're not Bill," Ford breathes. She winces at his tone.

"D-did it ever occur to you," she wheezes, "that asking me to prove a negative right when I just woke up might- might be a shitty thing to do?"

He doesn't move, and she coughs.

"First of all, please give me my glasses back. Second off, Ford, look at my eyes. It's my regular eyes, not Bill eyes. Third... third, Ford, Jesus, I dunno what you want me to say, but it's going to bug the shit out of you if you shoot me and you're constantly having nightmares as it is, I don't want that to get any worse."

He gazes down at her, and she sighs. "Okay, here. Remember our first parallel Earth? The world had ended in 1954 and it was all crazy religious? Remember how we found your old house but it wasn't yours? Only... only we went up to the bedroom and it was yours. Two five year old boys named Stan lived there. And we were both fucked up for a long time about it, but you know what? Everywhere else somebody had died, they left behind that brown sludgy shit and their clothes all laid out. That hadn't happened in your house. You boys and your parents and your big brother, whatever had happened, none of you were at home, even though that was your parents' business so at least they shoulda been."

She puts a hand over his wrist, running her thumb across the bones at the base of his palm. His hands are shaking badly. "Thirty, forty, fifty years, you know, we dunno how much time had passed, but I figured, you know, odds are, if they didn't get got during that initial stuff, maybe they made it out okay. Maybe it turns out everyone ended up living okay in Australia or Cuba or whatever. Maybe there's some way that other Stanford is bouncing around the multiverse, like us. Right? Can't expect the worst out of every situation we see."

"That's..." He leans back, dropping the gun and putting his hands over his face. "Let's... not... talk about that."

"Okay," Ripley says quietly from below him. "Are we good, Professor? Can you stop crushing my pelvis into oblivion?"

"Sorry. Sorry," he mumbles, scootching as far away from her as possible. She sits up and retrieves her glasses, feeling around to see if anything's broken. She's pretty sure she's just bruised and sore, though, so there is that.

Ripley reaches out, brushing her knuckles against Ford's sleeve. "Come on, buddy. Let's figure out a way to get out of this hellhole."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

According to Ripley, they're exactly six weeks shy of Ford's 42nd birthday when they end up in a parallel Earth overrun by zombies. They think it might be some Earth farther in the future than their own; based on what little they see of the existing technology. They have no interest in staying longer than it takes to figure this out, but by the time they do, Ripley notices that what they thought was a spare power source for Ol' Sparky was actually a completely spent older core. They go in search of either a survivor (can't sing a three-part harmony without a third) or the ingredients for the zombie cure, which Ford's had to use once while he was still homeside and twice since he went through the portal.

It's Ford's fault they're stuck here. He should have noticed sooner, he was the one who'd been holding on to the cores, if he had noticed sooner they could have grabbed extra, but now, but now-

"Hey," Ripley's voice shakes Ford out of his headspace, her hand warm and grounding on his shoulder. "You okay?"

"I just can't believe we're stuck here," he grumbles, and she pats him.

"There's always a way, Ford. We're just going to have to spend extra time looking for it," she says cheerfully. "'Sides, yer a certifiable genius, the answer t'all our problems will jus' pop inta yer head when ya least expect it. Stop worryin'."

He doesn't answer; her baseless optimism grates on his nerves almost as much as the fact that she apparently hasn't realized that he _knows_ she employs her nigh-nonexistent Southern accent whenever she wants him to feel smart- or, at least, smarter than her.

Ripley leans over the edge of the building's roof- it's oppressively hot up here but it was the best place to wait out the horde of the undead clamoring mindlessly below.

"Do you think anybody ever gets turned into a zombie and a ghost at the same time?" she asks.

"Yes, in certain conditions," he replies shortly, tapping his pen against the page of his journal. It's the third one he's started since they got together and he's going to need a fourth soon; the other two are crammed back to front with entries, sketches, and notations, and are currently weighing down the satchel at his side. Storage is going to become an issue if he insists on writing everything down, but he just... can't stand the thought of losing everything he's worked on in the past five years. He glances over at Ripley, who is waggling her eyebrows at him with an expression that could mean literally anything coming from her. "What?"

"So what conditions would make somebody a zombie and also a ghost?" she prompts. She even takes out her own journal and a pencil, clearly intending to make his response the bulk of her entry for the day.

"Well- they would have to have died and already become a ghost," he says, sighing. "Afterwards, their remains could conceivably be reanimated as a zombie. If a living person is turned into a zombie, they keep enough of their faculties that they can be successfully un-zombified, so by definition they cannot become a ghost."

"You've done that before, right?" she asks absentmindedly, scribbling furiously in her journal.

"Yep," he says quietly, picking at the fingernails on his right hand.

"Kind of sounds like you scientifically proved the existence of souls using zombies and ghosts," Ripley says hopefully.

"I'm sure that's not a scientifically sound conclusion based on this conversation," he replies dully.

"Well- okay, what about demon possession? That's an actual thing we've actually experienced first- and second-hand," Ripley says stubbornly. "Where does the you that is _only you_ go when a demon possesses your body, which includes the meat parts of your brain? You still exist because you continued to exist even without the meat so that means-"

" _Ripley_ ," he says sharply, and she stops, blinking. "Ripley, I don't want to talk about that today."

"Sorry," she says quietly. He's not sure what she's feeling right now; nearly five years as his constant companion has taught him a lot about how she operates, but there are still mysteries to why she does things. Her pulse speeds up a little, and when he feels the change through his star sapphire he touches the necklace under his shirt before he realizes that's what he's doing.

"You alright?" he asks, after a moment.

"I'll be glad to be somewhere else, is all," she says, putting her journal away. "You know, once we get off this damn roof, I spotted a satellite array 'bout three-four miles from here. Looks to be some kind of military installation, from what I saw of it. We could probably cannibalize parts to convert local power supplies into the juice we need for Sparky."

"Sounds feasible. What direction?" he asks.

"Just a little south of west," she replies, pointing. "On this side of the river, so we don't have to worry about crossing it, at least. Maybe take a day to get there from here."

"Sounds like a plan," he tells her, and she grins.

She looks like she has something else to say, some comment on the tip of her tongue, and Ford is never going to know what it is because they both hear, at the same time, a loud thud followed by a horrifying crunch: the roof access door has just been broken down.

To their credit, neither of them freeze. In seconds Ripley and Ford are armed- Ford with his lucky plasma blaster, Ripley with the spare laser pistol Ford insisted on just this morning. The first four zombies to shamble through the door are turned into a pile of ragged, disembodied limbs and a rotten-apple colored mist. As more of the zombies start pushing forward Ford realizes that Ripley's a fast shot, but only three of four hits are actually landing on zombie flesh, and just under half of her hits incapacitate their attackers. Ford, on the other hand, is much more accurate, but he's slow- taking maybe one shot for every three of hers. It's not usually an issue- usually, she's using her sword and is in the thick of things, and his careful shots are well-appreciated for never accidentally hitting her instead of an opponent.

Ripley's getting overwhelmed, missing more of her shots. One of the zombies gets close enough to grab her arm before she shoots it point-blank. Ford can feel her panic in the steady thrumming pulse through the companion necklace. He needs to get her out of here. He needs to get her to safety. There is nowhere safe here.

The noise from the fight is attracting more of the zombies on the ground to their position. They counted six dozen on the ground, and have no way to know how many zombies were already in the building on each individual floor as they raced up the stairs to the roof. Ford makes up his mind.

"Ripley," Ford says firmly. "Listen to me: you have to keep going. I will find you in 46'\\. Do you understand? No matter what happens here, if I am still alive _I will find you_."

"What?" Ripley asks, faltering. "Ford, you jackass, we're leaving here together-"

"No, Ripley, we can't, you have to get out of this alive, so when I say jump just do it, okay?" he snaps, blasting the head off two zombies who luckily lined up nice and pretty on their way through the door.

"What?! Fuck you, Ford, I'm not leaving and you can't make me!" she snarls, dismembering a zombie and beheading another. "We can do this, Ford-"

"Ripley for once will you just do as I ask without fucking questioning everything?" Ford explodes, reaching across her hip to snatch Ol' Sparky. "I know I can get out of this! I know I can build another portal generator! And _I know you can't_ so just let me protect you!"

The necklace skips a beat as Ripley stares at him, shocked, and then starts up again, faster than ever.

"No, Ford, no-" she starts, but he's already igniting Ol' Sparky and firing up the portal generator- too weak to allow both of them through, but just enough to allow one person.

"I will find you," he promises. He stuffs the deactivated hilt down her shirt so she can use it once she finds a new power source. He shoves her through the portal. She starts to fall.

Too late he sees the tops of trees instead of concrete, too late he realizes that they're four stories up and wherever he sent her, the building they're standing on doesn't exist. He has enough time to see her expression- outrage and terror and shock- and it's too familiar, too like Stanley, the smell of burning flesh and hair-

And the portal closes and the stone hanging from the chain around his neck becomes inert and still, and he's not sure why he's screaming as he tears into the zombies on the rooftop with him.


	6. Epilogue

_I feel so bad, I got a worried mind,_  
_I'm so lonesome all the time,_  
_Since I left my baby behind._

_(on blue bayou)_

It takes about a day for Ford to get to the satellite array Ripley spotted, and maybe a couple of weeks to cobble together something that could become a portal generator. It would have been less time, but Ripley ~~carried~~ carries the tools with her, so he had to improvise a great deal. She is still alive. Ford would know if she wasn't still alive.

(the stone is smooth and cold and motionless, the side that touches his skin is always warm)

It takes another month to get a working generator. It helps that this world seems to have ended nearly seventy years after 1982; Ford imagines this amount of technological innovation taking place at home.

(in this place, in this time, fiddleford was right about the personal computers, who would have thought)

Ford works through their fifth anniversary. He remembers the date suddenly, nearly two weeks after the fact. He digs through his satchel and holds the wrapped box in his hand. It's a wrist-mounted energy shield that looks a bit like a bracelet she admired in a shop once. She ~~would have loved~~ will love it. She will love it. She's still alive. He would know if she wasn't.

(her shaggy, shoulder-length hair, billowing up around her face as she falls)

Ford takes as much as he can comfortably carry at a dead run. He activates the makeshift portal and, after a moment's hesitation, steps through. She ~~would want~~ wants him to keep moving, to look for her, to look for home.

It takes a year for him to stop having the nightmares about her- nightmares where he sees the zombies pull her to pieces. Nightmares where he sees her fall and fall and fall forever. Nightmares where she's dead and the only thing piloting her body is that fucking one-eyed demon.

("why does everyone you love leave, six-fingers?" a smile, teeth broken and bloody, "because they're all dead," and she's so cold but if he holds her tightly enough maybe, maybe, maybe-)

It takes three years to forget small things. The feeling of the calluses on her hands as she holds him in her sleep. The alien stances she goes through every day, practicing her swordsmanship when they have the luxury. The smell of her hair after the rain. The big things, at least, are safely recorded in his journals, and he pores obsessively over them- Funfetti, Planes Trains and Automobiles, Blue, Egg Salad, Ford. A sketch of her while she was sleeping, propped up against a window with her mouth open. The stupid bunny tattoo on the front of her hip. Her favorite wanted poster, tucked between pages about their experiences on a planet populated with barely-sentient robots. A list of jokes she laughs at every time he tells them, complete with his notations on how often he should tell them so that she doesn't get tired of hearing them.

It takes five years to accept that he's never going to see her again. On what would have been their tenth anniversary he gets dangerously, violently drunk, and nothing is better.

It takes seven years to get into a situation where he will absolutely die without a fire. He frantically tears out every page of his journals that include important information about her, saving them in his pack with the only photo he has of himself and Stanley. He burns his journals, one by one, and survives the long and frigid night. When the sun comes up he looks through the pages he saved, realizes he forgot to take out the drawing of her, digs through the still-hot ashes looking for any scrap of her, finds nothing.

("where do you go, the you that's only you?" if he'd known it was the last time he would have said something better, he would have let her talk, he would have said something comforting but instead he ruined it, like he ruins everything)

It takes eight years to realize he is never going home. He is pretty sure it's his fiftieth birthday. He unwraps the anniversary bracelet he made for her and pawns it in the next dimension he gets to, uses the money to buy some supplies, gets drunk again.

He gets shot eleven years on, and his blood stains the papers torn from his journal. He salvages the wanted poster, the photo of himself as a child, the list of jokes she liked. He hallucinates seeing Stanley in the dark, filthy alleyway he's holed up in, imagines his brother crouching down to look at the wound on his shoulder, the broad, open-faced teenager who he must never have really known at all.

"You would have loved her," he says, and it's so important that he explain, that someone else knows her name and who she was, but the ghost of Stanley fades away and Ford is left alone again. He patches himself up in a moment of clarity, finds an abandoned apartment building and breaks in.

It takes seventeen years to end up trapped in a two-dimensional dimension, to be battered and injured more badly than he's ever been, to meet a seven-eyed Oracle who saves him and puts a titanium plate in his head to guard against Bill. For a few months it's almost okay again. Jheselbraum seems familiar, and kind, and for the first time in a long time Ford remembers, unbidden, the feeling of Ripley's hand in his. The Oracle gives him a mission- find Bill. Destroy Bill. Ford's no longer a young man. It'll be a good end-note on an otherwise wasted life, Ford thinks.

It's eighteen years, two months, and some number of days (Ford really hasn't ever caught the knack of telling time in his head the way Ripley could) and he sees the open portal before him deep within the Nightmare Realm and he knows it's pure idiocy, he knows it leads home, he knows this portal being open will tear the fabric of reality apart, but if he steps through at least he can contain the inevitable rift, the damage has already been done-

(he doesn't notice the necklace under his shirt begins to beat the moment he steps through)

 

 _I'm going back someday, come what may_  
_to Blue Bayou_  
_Where the folks are fine, and the world is mine_  
_on Blue Bayou_

 

What happens is this: two broken legs, a concussion, bruises everywhere, bloody scratches and scrapes everywhere, blistering burns on her chest because the sword was still hot from having been activated moments before being shoved down her shirt, and a mouthful of blood because she bites through her tongue when she lands. Delirium. Begging. Silence. Darkness.

Light. Pain. Awareness. Pain. A bed, a ceiling, vertigo, vomit. Pain. Awareness. A smooth, cool hand. Light. A room, curtains closed against a window, a ceiling, a woven tapestry showing a single sword against a background of mint-green clouds and a bloody gold (yellow) crown. Pain, but defined- legs, back, chest, throat, mouth. Her mouth tastes like old blood. Her tongue is sore. She feels around- she's missing another tooth. That makes two.

Lightpainawareness. She's awake in a bed she doesn't recognize, in a room that she's never seen before, and Ford- _Ford_. She's in pain and Ford's not here, Ford was fighting zombies alone like an idiot, Ford pushed her off a building-

"I'm glad to see you're awake," a calm voice, a fluttering veil, seven gentle eyes. It comes to Ripley then- two years ago, maybe two and a half? The fortune-teller lady. Rivers of blood.

"H-how," Ripley tries to say, before her words dissolve into hacking coughs that send burning waves of pain through her entire torso.

"I wasn't joking about being able to see the future, kiddo," she says softly. Ripley thinks that makes sense, as much as anything does right now.

God, she is so pissed at Ford right now.

"F-Ford," she rasps, eyes widening.

"He's going to be fine," the veiled lady says, brushing the hair off Ripley's burning forehead. "And so are you. Rest now."

It's a dreamless, restful sleep.

 

 _Gonna see my baby again,_  
_Gonna be with some of my friends,_  
_Maybe I'll feel better again._

  
_(on blue bayou)_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All lyrics quoted in this chapter: Blue Bayou, by Linda Ronstadt.


End file.
